21/11/2025
🫀 This is the human heart — with no muscle and no fat.
The human heart, when stripped of all fat and muscle to expose only its intricate web of coronary arteries and cardiac veins, offers a hauntingly beautiful glimpse into our internal architecture.
This rare anatomical preparation—most famously displayed by controversial anatomist Gunther von Hagens—reveals the heart not as a mass of muscle but as a delicate vascular engine.
The coronary arteries, responsible for supplying oxygen-rich blood to the heart muscle, and the cardiac veins, which return oxygen-poor blood, are laid bare in a way that textbooks rarely capture.
Von Hagens, best known for his BODY WORLDS exhibits, pioneered the plastination technique, preserving real human bodies and organs in lifelike detail. While his work has sparked ethical debates over consent and public display of human remains, it has also profoundly changed how people engage with human anatomy.
This heart specimen, devoid of all but its circulatory pathways, is more than just a scientific artifact—it’s a visual metaphor for how life depends on pathways we rarely see but can't live without.
Source: Anatomical exhibition and plastination techniques by Gunther von Hagens, BODY WORLDS.