The wonders of the human body will be front and center at the Peoria Riverfront Museum for the remainder of 2023.
The world-renowned Body Worlds RX is paired with the locally-produced HEART exhibit for what museum president and CEO John Morris is calling "the greatest investment in healthcare exhibitions in the history of Peoria."
Body Worlds RX features donated human specimens and organs preserved through a process called plastination. The exhibits has been viewed by more than 54 million people worldwide since its 1995 inception.
Dr. Angelina Whalley is the curator of Body Worlds, and director of the Institute for Plastination. She said real specimens touch people in a way 3D models do not.
"People walk into the exhibit. They look at these specimens, but what they detect is themselves. It is as if they look at themselves. And when you see that for the first time, it's so empowering," Whalley said.
She said many come away from the exhibit with a better appreciation of their own bodies, and a sense that they shouldn't be taken for granted.
"That will make you think about your life, about your health, and what you can do to stay healthy," she said.
HEART was organized by Peoria Riverfront Museum Bill Conger. It's a topic near and dear to him: he suffered a massive heart attack in October 2020.
"I died, and irreparably kind of altered the course of the rest of my life," Conger said.
The Peoria area's medical community partnered to create the exhibit, which is centered around a nearly five foot tall, four-dimensional model of a human heart created at the Jump Trading Medical Simulation Center at OSF Saint Francis Medical Center.
Retired pediatric cardiologist Dr. Tony Cutilletta was a key player guiding the design of the exhibit, Conger said.
"He took all of his history, his decades of knowledge and gave it to us. How do you tell parents, traumatized parents, that their child was about to go through some serious hard stuff? How do you do this? We draw pictures, you tell stories, you make analogies and metaphors," Conger said. "And he gave it all to us, and we took that information and kind of wrapped it up into an exhibition form."
Both exhibitions officially open on Saturday.
