'A kind of beauty': Book provides offbeat look at ancient science

BERLIN (Reuters) -- The man's nose presses against the glass and his open mouth, surrounded by a rough day-old beard, reveals a gold tooth.

The image suggests a photograph of a sleeping figure. But the face is sliced in two, down through the nose and mouth, stored in formaldehyde for eternity. The other half is missing.

The arresting image of the dead is one of a series of photographs of people, animals and fish pickled in jars for scientific study documented in a new book, "Conserving."

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"For us, they have a kind of beauty; they are not intended to shock," said Geo Fuchs, who, with her husband Daniel, has spent five years combing through Europe's anatomical and natural history collections for the project.

Yet the photographs are jarring and they command attention.

One, like so many in the book impressive in its sharp detail, shows a close up of a child biting down on his lower lip. A crack opening the forehead shows this is no resting boy.

"This face of a child is from 1690," she said. "It is fascinating to us to think that it really looks alive, it looks like marble, like stone and it's 300 years old."

The German couple started photographing preserved fish samples five years ago, searching through thousands of jars in different collections for interesting objects. They moved on to animals and then humans.

"We were looking for a kind of beauty. With the fish, the animals and also with the humans we were fascinated by the specimens and by how they look and how good they look."

The couple were far from the first to be intrigued by the preserved parts of the dead.

In 1697, Russian Czar Peter the Great was so taken by a collection of anatomical oddities he saw in Holland -- most consisting of human fetuses in formaldehyde -- that he eventually bought the lot for an exorbitant price and took it to his new capital, St. Petersburg.

"Having stopped in front of a child's body which was so perfectly preserved that the child seemed alive and smiling, Peter could not refrain from kissing the baby," one scribe of the era wrote.

The technique of storing animal and human samples in jars dates back hundreds of years and has grown as scientists and students have sought to understand the living world.

"Many of these samples serve for teaching purposes," said Gerhard Plodowski, deputy director of Frankfurt's Senckenberg Museum, one of Europe's leading natural history museums. "Any student studying medicine will have to learn anatomy, which means not only the skeleton and the bones but the soft parts."

Because of the ease of storing samples in formaldehyde or alcohol, scientists can use the technique even on exotic expeditions. And after the research is done, the object stays in the jar, usually in storage somewhere.

The urge to preserve means many millions of such jars crowd museums, laboratories and storerooms the world over.

Officials differ on how much of these by-products of science the public should actually see.

"Scientific work has to be presented to the public. It's not a hidden hobby of the scientists," said Ambros Haenggi, director of the Natural History Museum in Basle, Switzerland.

"The real question is how it should be presented," he went on. "We only show animals, no fish and certainly no humans."

The Museum of Anthropology in St. Petersburg is far less squeamish about showing off its collection -- including a so-called Janus fetus with faces on the front and back of the baby's head -- obtained by Peter the Great.

The images presented in "Conserving" -- a large coffee-table picture book -- are unusual in that they bring such powerful images into the home. The book is also a stretch of the norm for its Munich-based publisher Edition Reuss, which usually focuses on raunchy erotic picture books.

The years of work with formaldehyde-preserved specimens have not convinced the Fuchses to give their own bodies to medical science so that they too can one day be preserved. But their work has given them a bond of sorts with the jars.

"For us it was never a strange or a grotesque situation," said Geo Fuchs. "When you work in the collections for such a long time, you know, you are used to it and you look at it with -- how can I say -- you like them."

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