Huh. With my own milestone of that great date looming not too far off in the not distance enough future, the convergence of celebrating a 60th birthday and looking at dead bodies just doesn’t sit right with me. And even though many punters visiting Thailand pay good money to spend a short time with a lifeless hunk of flesh, I’m not sure devoting part of your holiday to that pursuit, even if it is free, is necessarily the best use of your time. But then a lot of touri include a trip to one of Bangkok’s ladyboy cabarets shows during their visit to the Big Mango, so what do I know? Personally, faced with the choice of paying to watch ladyboys lip-synch to show tunes and pop hits from a decade or more ago when the antics of the third gender trolling for fresh meat on Sukhumvit is not only more entertaining but free, and taking up Thailand’s Institute of Forensic Medicine’s offer to watch an autopsy being performed . . . well, some decisions are just too easy to make.

Last week, in honor of 60 years of helping police in cases of suspicious deaths, The Institute of Forensic Medicine opened its doors to the public, offering a glimpse into its work. Visitors can now schedule a date to watch a live autopsy, just a step above renting a mirrored ceilinged hotel room. The Institute – which typically receives between eight and 12 bodies a day, although sometimes the number can be as high as 40, for example when the Red Shirts are in town – wants the public to know just what it is they do. In gruesome detail. Interested sick puppies and future spree killers can contact the Institute, state who they are, why and when they wish to visit, how many people will be involved, and their request will be considered on a case-by-case basis. Note this is not a BYOB affair.

Of course if you do Bangkok right, death is just part of life and can be part of your Thailand experience too. While the opportunity of watching an autopsy is new, seeing dead people has always been one of your options for catching the sights of the city. And unlike in Pattaya you won’t get a crick in your neck from having to keep an eye peeled skyward. The grande dame of dead bodies on display in Bangkok is the Forensic Museum, six exhibition centers in one located inside the Siriraj Hospital on the west bank of the Chao Phraya river. It’s a must-see stop for the morbidly inclined and with Halloween just around the corner, a perfect outing for October.

When you too have been disappointed to find the Grand Palace is closed, you can either take a tuk tuk tour of nearby wats, tailors, and gem stores, or you can head back to the Chang Pier and catch the cross river ferry to the grounds of the Siriraj Hospital, which features six distinct museums within two separate buildings, three of which should give a stiffy to those who get off on stiffies. And at only 40 baht for admission, it’s a great outing for cheap bastards too. As well as for size queens . . .

First up is the Parasitology Museum where you can see the dangers of the creepy crawlers among us that you can’t see. Exhibits of hookworms, pinworms, roundworms, and you-name-it worms dominate, and if you ever wondered why you’re supposed to ensure that meat is well cooked before eating it – or exactly what you can come down with from eating at a street food cart – know you’ll know. The big Kodak moment, however, is the 35kg half of a pair of balls from a victim of elephantiasis that would make any male elephant jealous.

What’s the difference between a baby and a bagel? You can put a bagel in the toaster. You have to put the baby in the oven . . . yup, finally a place where you can use all those dead baby jokes. The draw at the Ellis Pathological Museum is a cornucopia of births gone wrong – as it is in Sunee Plaza – where a multitude of tiny bodies encased forever in sarcophaguses of glass and formaldehyde awaits. I mean what visit to Thailand is complete without catching a glimpse of some real no-longer-alive Siamese Twins? I’m sure there is a legitimate reason for a room filled with floating pre-natal cadavers, other than to entice a visit out of those who love babies, or to answer that age old question of how do you make a dead baby float (two scoops of ice cream, one scoop of dead baby) but this exhibit might be too much for some touri. Fortunately for true lovers of Thailand, a more recent exhibit will wash those concerns away; the Pathological Museum also has a room with a mannequin reenactment of the chaos that ensued during the forensic pathology investigations which were taking place around the clock during the aftermath of the tsunami that struck Phuket in 2004.

The heart of the combined museums (literally) however is the Songkran Niyomsane Forensic Medicine Museum where you’ll become intimately acquainted with embalmed bodies of murderers, exhibits of ghastly deaths, and the ephemera gathered from murder scenes. The forensic room shows the bodies of accident victims, murderers, and even the dried body of a famous madman who was known to eat kids’ livers in the 1950s. As soon as you walk into the building you’re greeted by the skeleton remains of the founder of the institute, who left his body to the museum, hanging over the entrance. Photos of train wrecks, fatal car accidents, and motorcycle decapitations that newspapers worldwide refuse to print, hemorrhaged brains, severed arms and other limbs, and various parts of the body displaying stab wounds – not to mention a rather cool selection of skulls with bullet holes at various angles – round out what could certainly be one of your most memorable experiences in Bangkok. Unless you try to stiff your taxi driver and end up on display at the Forensic Medicine Museum yourself. (The Bangkok Forensic Museum is open Monday through Saturday – 09:00 to 16:00.)

If mastering the use of the cross river ferry boats is beyond your abilities, but you still don’t want to miss out on seeing corpses on display (beyond those huddled together nightly at Dick’s Cafe’s street-side tables) you still are in luck while visiting Siam Square. Hell, after a shopping excursion with your boy du jour you’ll probably want to kill someone anyway. Thanks to Chulalongkorn University’s Faculty of Dentistry, for the price of a drink at a Soi Twilight gogo bar you can drool over 14 bodies and over 130 spare body parts, all dissected, split open, cut in half, or neatly sliced and diced. Best yet, at The Human Body Museum you can you can even touch the bodies or weigh a real brain with your hand!

While visitors to the Songkran Niyomsane Forensic Medicine Museum have to make due with looking at body parts floating in fomaldehyde, the liquid tends to get brownish and murky after a while and the entire experience is a bit distant and removed. But at the Human Body Museum they use a process called plastination, which consists of replacing water, fluids and fat inside the body with resin and plastic, resulting in perfectly preserved bodies that would make Joan Rivers green with envy.

It is a costly process – the Human Body Museum’s collection is valued at several million baht – developed and patented by Germany’s Doctor Death, Dr. Gunther von Hagens. And as cool as the museum’s visceral glory is, rumors that the bodies on display once belonged to executed Chinese convicts puts some potential visitors off. But where else can you see a display of two inch thick, horizontal body slices arranged top-to-bottom, as if the someone tripped head first through a meat slicer? Located on the 9th floor of the Faculty of Dentistry just opposite Siam Paragon, The Museum of the Human Body is open Wednesday through Friday, from 12:30 to 18:30. It may not be the best place to take your boy du jour on your first ‘date’ but is the perfect outing when he’s asked for a new cell phone one too many times.

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