Inventor of plastination, Gunther von Hagens, ill with Parkinson’s disease, has asked for his body to be part of London exhibition when he dies

The wife of the German scientist who became known as “Dr Death” for his pioneering work on the preservation of corpses has spoken of her shock when he asked her to plastinate his body after his death.

Dr Gunther von Hagens – the man who invented plastination in the late 1970s – is ill with Parkinson’s disease and has declared his wish to become a permanent part of the Body Worlds exhibition, a vast 2,600 square metres of skulls, organs and cadavers, which opens to the public in London this week.

His wife, the German anatomist Dr Angelina Whalley, said Von Hagens had said he wanted only her to carry out the work. “Of course, in the very beginning I thought, Gunther, you are kidding me! This is something I would never be able to do,” Whalley told the Observer.

But once her incredulity had subsided, she came to realise she needed to carry out her husband’s request. “It’s somehow finalising his life’s work,” she said. “I understand now that it’s more an appreciation and an expression of love for me to do it.”

Plastination is anything but a quick process. Unwinding muscles, nerves and arteries is painstaking, but then there is the whole process of silicone impregnation and positioning the body in a pose. Altogether, it takes about a year.

“He said to me: ‘Angelina, you are entitled to freeze me down to -25C for one year, but after that time you really need to put your hands on me because otherwise I will get freeze burn.’ So I have one year for mourning and then I will have to do it.”

When it happens – and Whalley still hopes that moment is a long way off – her husband will join a growing collection in the London Pavilion, in central London, of “plastinates”. These corpses frozen in time help educate people on “the treasure” of the human body, she says. The exhibits are the bodies of real humans drained of their fluids, then replaced with silicone and plastics to preserve them and make them hard.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Dr Whalley with her husband and one of their exhibits. Photograph: Dirk Laessig

There is a rider astride a leaping skeletal horse, with the man’s skull broken in two, his brain in one hand and a whip in the other. Another exhibit shows a trio of poker players in different states of dissection (it appeared in the James Bond film Casino Royale).

“If you look at their faces, you will see quite different characters. But the anatomical structures are also very different,” Whalley said.

One of them has his belly sliced open so that visitors can see his inner organs; another exposes the heart inside the chest.

“In the west we have somehow become distracted from death, although it is such a natural part of our life. Nowhere else than close to death can you really feel life,” she said.

Her husband, known for his flamboyance, would like his final pose to be a welcoming one, perhaps even at the entrance of the museum, she says. He has joked that he would like to be wearing his fedora (if his wife will let him).

“But we can never guarantee that an idea will be realised later on,” Whalley insists. “What we can finally do with a body once it comes to our institute depends on its age, how much decay there has been, or any illness that has taken place.”

She says that relatives and next of kin are never told about what happens to their loved ones’ bodies once they have been plastinated, otherwise – in the absence of funerals – specimens could become memorials.

What of her husband, though? Will he not be immediately recognisable as a plastinate, when his time comes?

“Gunther has dedicated his whole life to plastication. He invented it,” she said. “So I think it would be acceptable to make an exception with him.”