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Posted on: February 14th 2019

So how does the body really work?

On Friday the 18th January, Year 10 and 11 GCSE students were lucky enough to attend Body world 1 the Body Worlds Museum in London. This opportunity allowed us to view the body in detail, expanding our knowledge of the cardiovascular, respiratory, muscular and skeletal systems which we have been learning about in our theory lessons. We all thoroughly enjoyed this in-depth experience which brought our theory to life, enabling us to learn about the systems in greater depth by looking at the fascinating exhibits by Gunther Van Hagens. What I found most intriguing about the exhibition were the cardiovascular system exhibits. We got to see the effect of different diseases on the heart and the blood Body world 2 vessels, and the effect of smoking (and I was especially surprised to see the enormous number of capillaries found around the face alone) By injecting red plastics into the capillaries, they became visible to the naked eye around the face. We also got to see the placement of the organs within the body and it was interesting to note the difference between men and women, where women’s organs are crammed into a smaller space. There were also bodies in sporting positions, allowing us to see which muscles would be contracting and relaxing during these movements and to identify how the tendons join the muscle to bone and how the ligaments join bone to bone, explaining how movement occurs. This Body world 3 became incredibly clear when we saw the hand which is made up of numerous ligaments which help to produce really intricate movement. Overall, this was a very educational experience that I highly recommend to any GCSE PE and biology students as it put our learning into real-life context.