Museum of the Human Body: How to Get Inside a Giant Body and Not Go Crazy

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Who said that only in a fairy tale or science fiction movie can a person get inside the body of a giant and get out of there unharmed? In the Netherlands, for example, this is quite possible - and this is not at all a hint that drugs are legalized in this country. It's just that there is the world's only Museum of the Human Body, created so realistically that visitors are already breathtaking. Right from the doorway, you enter the human body and can move through all parts of the huge organism.

The museum, located in the city of Leiden near the capital of the Netherlands (it takes about 40 minutes to get there by car from Amsterdam, and an hour by bus), is hard to miss. Even from afar, you can see a giant figure in the form of a seated man, as it were, built into a modern high-rise building. And the entrance to the museum is located in the knee of this giant sculpture, to which you need to climb on a special escalator.

The sight is not for the faint of heart

Inside the museum there is actually a whole city, consisting of different parts of the body, through which you can wander at your pleasure, if, of course, you have strong nerves.

Starting from the thigh bone and observing the creation of white blood cells and red blood cells, travelers gradually work their way up the human body. In total, during their journey, they pass seven floors, if that is how you can call the parts of a giant man.

Each organ is depicted so realistically that it even becomes creepy, however, for novice doctors or simply those who like to study human physiology there is a real expanse here. The visitor feels like a small insect, moving along the "corridors" of an artificial giant man and observing how blood circulates, how the digestive tract works and a giant heart beats. The auditory and muscular systems, vocal cords, bones, teeth - all this can be studied in detail and seen "in action."

The work of each organ is broadcast on monitors and is accompanied by real sounds - if a person shrank many times and got inside another person, then this is what he would hear in a giant womb. In some cases, the work of the organs is presented not only visually, but also olfactoryly (for example, the audience is shown what kind of smell comes from the giant nostrils). Realism and full immersion in the process of acquaintance with organs and systems is also achieved with the help of special glasses that are given to visitors, so in essence this excursion is a 5D journey.

In the Museum of Man, you can even see how the birth of a new human life and the development of the fetus take place in the uterus (visitors are shown, among other things, the fertilization of an egg), because the steel man, inside which the excursionists travel - according to the creators' idea, is a woman.

Well, school-age sightseers especially like the language, in which, like on a trampoline, you can jump to the sound of human belching.

During the one-hour excursion, the guide (if you wish, you can use an electronic translator), in an accessible and exciting way, tells visitors about the structure of a person and what happens in our body in a given situation - for example, if one of the organs starts to junk.

By the way, while traveling through the body, visitors can clearly see how bad habits negatively affect the work of organs and systems and understand that in fact this whole seemingly strong mechanism is rather fragile.

The final point of the journey through the huge artificial organism is the human brain with neurons shown very realistically. Its gigantic convolutions, like other "exhibits" of a strange museum, can be touched with your hands.

What else you need to know about the museum

It took 12 years to develop the project of the museum, after which the construction itself lasted for almost two more years. And the implementation of this incredible idea cost more than $ 30 million. The main building is predominantly glazed, and the human figure is made of special steel that hardly corrodes. The height of the building is about 35 meters.

Tickets to this incredible country of the human body can be ordered via the Internet or bought at the ticket office of the museum, but the organizers advise to attend to their purchase in advance - there are too many people who want to get into this fascinating world called "man".

Children under the age of six are not allowed into the museum, which is logical: the kid is unlikely to like it in such a strange place.

To quickly come to your senses after the experienced emotions, you can relax in the cafe located here or look into the souvenir shop.

By the way, if in the Netherlands there is a museum in the form of a man, then in Belgium since the beginning of the last century there is a museum in the form of an atom. In our material you can find out about How iron lattice became more popular than Manneken Pis.