International Symposium on Plastination   07/21/07

Lecture 1

History of Plastination

M.-C. SORA*,

 Plastination Laboratory, Department for Systematical Anatomy, Centre for Anatomy and Cell Biology, The Medical University of Vienna, Austria, Europe.

Plastination has been developed for teaching as well as for research. Back in 1977, at the Department of Anatomy of Heidelberg University, Dr. von Hagens invented Plastination as a groundbreaking technology for preserving anatomical specimens with reactive polymers. The process was patented between 1978 and 1982. This method has proved to be the superior method for preservation of gross specimen.

The first conference on Plastination was held in San Antonio Texas in 1982. Since then Plastinators from all over the world meet every even year for an international conference. Interim meetings, which are primarily workshop based and usually take place in the USA, were started in 1989 in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Vienna was the first place to introduce this new method in the late 70ies. Nowadays the method is applied in more than 250 institutes for Human Anatomy, Veterinary Anatomy, Clinical Pathology, Biology and Zoology worldwide. The International Society for Plastination was founded in 1986; the first issue of Journal of the International Society of Plastination appeared in 1987.  In 1996 the first issue of the Current Plastination Index - an index listing all publication dealing with Plastination - was issued and updated in 2000.