With prices ranging from $7 to $40, the Fisk Metallic Burial Case could be purchased from the inventor himself, who set up a salesroom in New York City, or from one of several companies licensed to manufacture the product. New and improved styles—designed to eliminate “the disagreeable sensation produced by the coffin on many minds” (as one advertisement delicately put it)—were introduced, including models ornamented with molded drapery, finished in imitation rosewood, or trimmed with silk fringe. Even these aesthetic refinements, however, failed to obviate the unnerving effect of Fisk’s mummy case. Eventually, the original pattern was abandoned altogether and replaced with rectangular caskets that became hugely popular in the latter part of the nineteenth century.
BAD IDEAS IN
COFFIN MAKING
Once upon a time, the glass coffin was something found only in fairy tales—the preferred receptacle for preserving poisoned princesses until their saviors showed up to awaken them with a kiss. During the nineteenth century, this fantasy item briefly became a reality when a number of American inventors—in the evident belief that mourners craved a more transparent view of the departed when paying their final respects—took out patents on various airtight glass coffins. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these receptacles—the mortuary equivalent of old-fashioned canning jars—did not catch on big with the public.
The same period of our history produced other seriously bad ideas in coffin manufacture. According to funeral historians Robert Habenstein and William Lamers, the most notable “coffin also-rans” included the cement coffin, the terra-cotta coffin, the papier-mâché coffin, the rubber coffin, the wicker-basket coffin, and—perhaps weirdest of all—the adjustable coffin, suitable for corpses of all shapes and sizes.
Fisk didn’t live to see the widespread success of his invention. Though the historical records are fuzzy, indications are that by 1862 he was already dead and buried—snugly sealed for eternity in one of his form-fitting metal containers.
DIY Coffins
Just as embalming is rarely required by law anywhere in the United States, there are no federal or local statutes that say you have to be buried in a $5,000 Venetian Bronze casket purchased from your friendly neighborhood funeral home. You can easily get a perfectly nice coffin at a discount rate from one of many online companies such as CasketXpress (www.caskets.net), CasketSite.com, and BestPriceCaskets.com. Even Costco sells them now.
Alternatively, if you wish to return to the dignified simplicity displayed by our pioneer forefathers, there’s nothing to keep you from constructing your own plain wooden coffin. Some companies, such as Kent Casket Industries, will ship you a basic pine coffin in flat “knock-down” form. Anyone capable of using a screwdriver can easily assemble it in minutes. (Instructions can be viewed at www.kentcasket.com.) Charles “Outhouse Charlie” Hetrick, a Seattle-area craftsman, offers easy-to-assemble wood coffins that come complete with all the equipment required to build them—a hammer and a packet of nails (check out his website at www.outhousecharlie.com). Putting together one of the handcrafted coffins offered by Ark Wood Caskets of Ashland, Oregon, doesn’t require the use of any tools at all. You simply slide the six interlocking boards together, then thread the rope handles through the predrilled holes. (You can see a diagram at www.arkwoodcaskets.com.)
For those with slightly more advanced woodworking skills, do-it-yourself coffin kits requiring a certain degree of manual dexterity are available from various sources. You can order one online at www.mhpcasketkits.com or write to MHP Enterprises, RR#1, S-7, C-34, Crescent Valley, British Columbia, Canada, V0G 1H0. And if you’re a serious Mr. (or Ms.) Fix-it type, you can build your own coffin from scratch. Coffin-making instructions are available online from many different sources (Google “casket plans”). You can also find directions in various books. Complete patterns for a simple homemade “burial box” can be found in Ernest Morgan’s Dealing Creatively with Death: A Manual of Death Education and Simple Burial (Upper Access, 2001) and Coming to Rest: A Guide to Caring for Our Own Dead (Dovetail, 1998) by Julie Wiskind and Richard Spiegel. For the serious woodworker, Dale Power’s Do-It-Yourself Coffins: For Pets and People (Schiffer, 1997) offers step-by-step instructions for six different designs, ranging from a classic pine box to a poplar model that resembles an elegant antique chest and seems far too beautiful to be stuck underground.
Finally, if you are hopelessly inept but would still like to be buried in a simple pine box, you can always buy one from a carpenter. In his excellent book Grave Matters: A Journey Through the Modern Funeral Industry to a Natural Way of Burial (Scribner, 1997), Mark Harris suggests that you check the yellow pages under “carpenters” and “woodworking” to see if any of your local craftsmen is willing to make a basic coffin for you. You can also find a list of craftsmen who offer handmade wood caskets at www.funerals.org/frequently-askedquestions/casketretailers#artisan.
Plans for homemade casket. Courtesy of Julie Wiskind.
Rent-a-Casket
As every American male knows, there are certain once-in-a-lifetime occasions—your senior prom, your first wedding—when you have to dress up in fancier clothes than you’ll ever wear again. The traditional solution, of course, is to rent a tuxedo. Why invest in an expensive getup that you’ll need only once?
Well, that same commonsense principle has now been adopted by the death care industry. Increasingly, as a service to their customers, funeral homes have begun to offer rental caskets.
The way it works is this: When you die, your corpse gets to be laid out in a really snazzy upscale casket, so people can ooh and aah over your remains at the wake. Then, right before burial, your body is transferred to a significantly cheaper coffin that nobody but the worms is going to see anyway. The fancy rental casket is typically used for as many as four separate viewings before it is sold at a discount to its final occupant. (Yes, there is now such a thing as a “pre-used” coffin.)
If you’re looking for ways to cut down on the high cost of dying, you might want to see if this sensible, money-saving option is available from the friendly folks at your local funeral home.
Kool Koffins
If you’re the kind of hip, trendy person who’s always taken pride in your stylish appearance, you’re not going to want to show up at your own funeral encased in some dull, old-fashioned burial receptacle. While the average American funeral home stocks a wide variety of caskets, most of them are definitely on the stodgy side—the kind of dignified, conservative coffins that haven’t changed much in the last fifty years. A Batesville Seville walnut casket with satin finish and champagne velvet interior might represent the finest in mortuary craftsmanship. But fashionwise, it’s the funerary equivalent of the boxy, double-breasted Harris tweed suits favored by 1950s bankers. Not exactly the kind of thing that befits a lifelong hipster such as yourself.
Thankfully, there are a number of snazzy options available in today’s rapidly evolving mortuary marketplace. If you’re a folk art enthusiast, for example, you might consider obtaining one of the amazing caskets crafted by the famous Ga coffin carpenters of Accra, Ghana. These improbably whimsical receptacles are hand-carved and brightly painted wooden sculptures reflecting the occupation, status, or character of the deceased. A dead farmer might be buried in an oversize carrot, a fisherman in a giant sardine, a hunter in a great roaring lion, a planter in an enormous cocoa pod. You can read all about these wonderful objets—and see dozens of full-color photographs—in Thierry Secretan’s Going into Darkness: Fantastic Coffins from Africa (Thames and Hudson, 1995). Ghanaian folk-art coffins in a wide variety of styles—from cell phones to airplanes to running shoes—can also be ordered online at www.eshopafrica.com.
Crazy Coffins: “Guitar,” “Corkscrew,” “Sports Bag,” “Skateboard,” “Ballet Shoe.” Courtesy of Vic Fearn & Company Ltd. and Museum für Sepulkralkultur, Kassel, Germany.
Colourful Coffins: “Swan Lake.” Courtesy of Colourful Coffins.
Inspired by the Ghanaian tradition, the British cof
fin-making firm Vic Fearn and Company has begun producing its own spectacular line of “theme coffins” in shapes ranging from electric guitars and corkscrews to skateboards and ballet slippers. So sheerly gorgeous are these caskets that the idea of sticking them permanently underground seems slightly sacrilegious. They would be more at home in a European museum—where, in fact, they have been exhibited (they were the subject of a 2005 show, “Crazy Coffins,” at the Museum für Sepulkralkultur in Kassel, Germany).
Colourful Coffins: “Moon Baby” child’s coffin. Courtesy of Colourful Coffins.
Colourful Coffins: “Rock ‘n’ Roll.” Courtesy of Colourful Coffins.
If the Ghanaian caskets are folk art and the Vic Fearn versions high art, another British company, Colourful Coffins of Oxford, produces burial receptacles that fall under the category of commercial art. Adorned with bright, blandly pretty images—leaping doplins, rural sunsets, English countrysides, autumnal forests—these coffins are ideal for anyone who has ever wanted to be interred in a giant Hallmark greeting card. You can see them for yourself at www.colourfulcoffins.com.
A Brief History
of Embalming
Though the artificial mummification of corpses dates back to the days of the pharaohs, embalming (literally, preserving a dead body by anointing it with balm, i.e., a concoction of resin and aromatic spices) has a relatively recent history in Western civilization. With rare exceptions, the ancient Greeks and Romans didn’t practice it (on the contrary, the former often buried their dead in limestone sarkophagi designed to speed up decomposition). Nor did the Jews, who frowned upon embalming (along with cremation) as a desecration of the body.
Following these traditions, early Christians likewise shunned embalming. In the third century, St. Anthony denounced it as a pagan custom and declared that he had gone into the desert to ensure that his own body would not be artificially preserved upon death:
And if your minds are set upon me, and ye remember me as a father, permit no man to take my body and carry it into Egypt, lest, according to the custom which they have, they embalm me and lay me up in their houses, for it was to avoid this that I came into this desert. And ye know that I have continually made exhortation concerning this thing and begged that it should not be done, and ye well know how much I have blamed those who observed this custom. Dig a grave, then, and bury me therein, and hide my body under the earth, and let these my words be observed carefully by you.
Up through the late Middle Ages, embalming was rarely performed in Europe—and then only on personages of great eminence and wealth. Upon his death in 814, Charlemagne was embalmed, garbed in imperial robes, and placed in a seated position in his tomb at Aachen Palace. Both William the Conqueror (d. 1087) and Edward I (d. 1307) were also embalmed. The method employed in each of these cases was a rough approximation of Egyptian mummification. After the internal organs were removed and the blood drained from the major arteries, the eviscerated cavity was washed with alcohol and vinegar, then packed with aromatic spices and cotton. The incisions were sewn up, the veins cauterized, and the rectum and other orifices plugged with oakum. Then the entire cadaver was anointed with a mixture of turpentine, rose-water, and chamomile before being tightly wrapped in layers of wax-impregnated cloth.
Other preservative methods were occasionally used. Funeral historians Robert Habenstein and William Lamers describe the case of one medieval nobleman whose long-entombed cadaver—“sheeted in lead and boxed in an elm coffin”—was exhumed in the late eighteenth century. “When the lead was opened,” they write, “the body was revealed to be lying wholly perfect in a liquor resembling mushroom catchup. Someone tasted the preservative and found that it tasted like ‘catchup, and of the pickle of Spanish olives.’”
It was not until the Renaissance that embalming became more widely practiced in Europe. The main impetus behind the search for new and improved methods of corpse preservation sprang from the renewed interest in human anatomy, not only among physicians and surgeons but among artists as well—most famously Leonardo da Vinci, who dissected several dozen cadavers and (with his usual preternatural inventiveness) conceived a system of intravenous injection that anticipated by several centuries the embalming methods of the modern era.
In Elizabethan England, funeral embalming—along with bloodletting, tooth extraction, and haircutting—was the exclusive province of the barber-surgeons. For more than a century, members of this powerful guild jealously guarded their legal prerogative to perform the procedure. Because of its expense, only the rich and powerful could afford it. In the early 1700s, however, a growing number of English tradesmen-undertakers—whose business had previously been confined to selling coffins and assorted mortuary paraphernalia (as well as cabinets, upholstered chairs, and other household furnishings)—began to practice cut-rate embalming: basically a crude form of human taxidermy that consisted of scooping out the viscera and filling the hollow torso with sawdust and tar.
In the meantime, various European scientists had been experimenting with the more sophisticated technique of arterial injection. Various fluids were employed in these early attempts, including arsenic-and-alcohol solutions and “camphorated spirits of wine.” The results were decidedly mixed. One seventeenth-century Italian physician, Girolamo Segato, managed to turn a corpse into stone by infusing its tissues with a solution of silicate of potash.
Far more effective was the method pioneered by the celebrated eighteenth-century anatomist William Hunter, who preserved anatomical specimens with a combination of old-fashioned cavity packing and an arterial injection process that utilized oil of turpentine mixed with other ingredients. In 1775, Hunter used this procedure to embalm the wife of Martin Van Butchell, a colorful London quack, whose marriage contract supposedly stipulated that he could maintain control of his spouse’s fortune only “as long as she remained above ground.” Working with a colleague, Hunter injected the late Mrs. Van Butchell with his special embalming recipe (enhanced with vermillion dye to give a rosy hue to her flesh). She was then outfitted with glass eyes, garbed in a fine linen gown, and placed in a glass-lidded case for display in her husband’s drawing room, where she became such a popular attraction that Van Butchell was compelled to place a notice in the London newspapers limiting visiting hours to “any day between Nine and One, Sundays excepted.” Eventually, Van Butchell remarried. For some reason, his new wife wasn’t thrilled about having her predecessor’s corpse in the parlor, and Van Butchell was forced to donate it to the Royal College of Surgeons, where it remained until 1941, when—along with other rarities—it was destroyed during the London blitz.
Because he was the first to describe the method in print, Hunter is generally credited as “the originator of the injection technique of preserving human remains.” (The great Dutch anatomist Frederik Ruysch had successfully embalmed human specimens via arterial injection a century earlier but never disclosed the details of his process or the ingredients of his fluid.) Even so, another hundred years would pass before this procedure became standard among undertakers.
In the meantime, people continued to rely on other methods of corpse preservation, including steeping dead bodies in alcoholic beverages. When Lord Nelson was killed at Trafalgar, for example, his officers—unwilling to dispose of his body at sea—stuffed him in a cask of rum so that his corpse could be returned to England. (According to legend, when the cask was eventually opened it was found to be nearly drained of liquor. Supposedly, the British sailors—unable to manage without their daily dole of rum—had surreptitiously siphoned off the liquid contents of the cask. Thereafter, the phrase “tapping the admiral” became slang for sneaking unauthorized swigs of liquor.)
Undertaker humor: ad for Oriental Embalming Fluid, circa 1890.
Hamlet: “Alas, poor Yorick, if he had only been embalmed with Oriental there would have been more of him.”
In America, corpse preservation remained in a rudimentary state until the mid-nineteenth century. Simple refrigeration was the most c
ommon approach. To keep it fresh for a few days until burial, a body might be laid on a “cooling board”—a plank of wood drilled with holes and placed upon some blocks of ice. In 1846, two Baltimore undertakers patented the world’s first “corpse cooler”: basically a metal ice chest designed to sit atop a recumbent torso and delay the decomposition of the internal organs. More elaborate models—including “cold air caskets” equipped with easily refillable ice compartments—soon followed.
The Civil War marked the beginning of the end of the “ice age” of American corpse preservation. By the late nineteenth century, the crudely refrigerated contraptions of the antebellum era had been rendered all but obsolete by various developments in the field of embalming: the widespread manufacture and marketing of preservative fluids and the discovery of formaldehyde; the refinement of new techniques and the invention of specialized implements such as the trocar (a long, hollow needle used in cavity embalming); the founding of the first schools of embalming and the publication of the earliest textbooks on the subject; the growing professionalization of the undertaking trade; and the appearance of journals such as Embalmer’s Monthly. By the dawn of the twentieth century, embalming was well on its way to becoming a major mortuary enterprise in the United States—the bedrock of the burgeoning death care industry.
The Whole Death Catalog Page 15