I've harvested spleens from the warm bodies of freshly killed laboratory mice. I've stared at fresh surgical scars and the wounds of a man who had flesh-eating bacteria. I've cleaned and dressed my own stitches.

So I wasn't expecting the "Body Worlds 2" exhibit, which opened Sunday at the Museum of Science in Boston, to upset me so much.

The sight of real human organs, cut up like butchered chicken and laid out in glass cases, gave me the same pulse-pounding nausea I felt the first time I watched surgery.

There's no warm-up to this exhibit. You walk in the door and there are the specimens: the skeleton of a dead child, a display of knee bones rubbed bare of cartilage by arthritis, a spinal column curved like a snake by some birth defect or disease.

On the periphery of the exhibit are full-size corpses, dissected and posed. I stared at "Man at Leisure," a body from which most of the internal organs had been removed to highlight the network of the its major nerves. The yellowed strings of nerve fiber jiggled with movements of the floor.

I looked around to see if anybody else was revolted by this.

The purpose of the traveling exhibit, said creator Gunther von Hagens, is to teach anatomy and encourage people to improve their health. The exhibit includes the blackened lungs of a smoker, organs riddled with tumors, and a 300-pound man's body sliced and opened to show the fat.

Von Hagens, a stiff-backed man who once spent two years as a political prisoner in East Germany, said the exhibit is also intended to help people confront death.

"The more I look into the faces of those who died ... the more I understand that life is very, very precious," von Hagens said.

That's not at all what I got out of the display of sliced and skinned dead bodies.

When I looked into the eyeballs of an anonymous stranger sticking out from his exposed red brain, the last thing on my mind was my own mortality. I was thinking about what kind of person would be inspired to do this exhibit.

The corpse displays got more abstract and "artistic" as I walked deeper into the exhibit. A male corpse had chunks of his body pulled out like drawers. A female corpse had her skin peeled back from her face like wings. When I clicked the audio guide to find out what possible scientific purpose this served, it gave me a snippet from an interview with von Hagens musing on death.

This was supposed to be an anatomy lesson?

Then I entered the prenatal development room, which thankfully was tucked away behind a wall. The corpse of a woman who is five months pregnant was displayed with her womb cut open to show the dead fetus. On pedestals around the room were dead fetuses of increasing size. There was also a display of embryos floating in pillars of liquid.

I asked von Hagens later, where did he get the fetuses? He said they came from old collections at anatomical museums.

Most of the corpses in the exhibit were donated by the living before they died. In fact, Von Hagens said he knew many of the specimens personally in life. He dissected and preserved the body of his best friend, who was diagnosed with a fatal kidney tumor at age 44. The process of preserving the body, he said, allowed him to contemplate the loss.

"It was like he reached to me across the barrier of death," von Hagens said.

His wife, Angelina Whalley, who invents many of the poses for the corpses, has agreed to preserve his body when he dies. They justify all this corpse sculpting as a matter of respecting the wishes of the dead, who donated their bodies for the sake of science. It is also a way of opening up one of the few areas von Hagens says is closed to the public: the autopsy.

"I call this the democratization of anatomy," von Hagens said.

If people are looking to donate their bodies to a good cause, there are tens of thousands of people on waiting lists for cadaver organ transplants at any given moment. And anybody who wants to see an autopsy can watch CSI.

I did leave the exhibit with a better understanding of how human organs fit together. The uterus is much smaller than I thought and sits very low in the pelvic bones, while the intestines are much higher than I imagined. I had a moment of wonder when I looked at the blood vessels of an arm, and couldn't resist touching my own arm.

Also to its credit, the exhibit contains much more science than some shows that have occupied the same space recently, such as the wildly popular "Star Wars" exhibit. The audio guide tour at times sounded like a reading of college-level anatomy text.

The lasting impression the exhibit left on me was not scientific, though. It was the awareness that muscles, bones and internal organs do not capture the spirit of a person.

In our culture, we honor the dead by remembering their lives and their spirits, not by taking apart their bodies and posing them artistically.

Certainly a future doctor or nurse would benefit from the detailed anatomy lesson that cadavers can provide. As for me, a realistic looking model would have been more than enough.

Health and science reporter Julie Kirkwood can be reached at (978) 946-2251, or via e-mail at jkirkwood@eagletribune.com.

If you go ...

What: "Body Worlds 2: The Anatomical Exhibition of Real Human Bodies"

Where: Museum of Science, Boston

When: Runs through Jan. 7, 2007, 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. (9 p.m. Friday and Saturday).

Cost: $24 adults, $21 students and seniors, $18 children (age 3 to 11), $16 for all ages after 5:15 p.m. except on Fridays. Advanced ticket reservations recommended. Ticket price includes voucher for admission to the rest of the museum.

Caution: Children under age 12 should be accompanied by an adult. The exhibit contains some material that may be inappropriate, such as adult genitalia and cadavers of fetuses.

Information: 617-723-2500 or www.mos.org/bodyworlds.