The Whole Death Catalog

by Harold Schechter

  RECOMMENDED READING

  Besides providing exhaustive instruction on corpse preservation procedures, Robert G. Mayer’s standard textbook, Embalming: History, Theory, and Practice (McGraw-Hill, 2000), contains a concise, highly readable historical survey of the subject. For an excellent work that places the development of modern embalming methods in the larger context of the Civil War and its transformative effect on the American relationship to death, check out Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering (Knopf, 2008).

  DEATH FUN FACT

  While certain cultures (such as the ancient Egyptians) have gone to great lengths to preserve dead bodies, others have taken the opposite tack. Ancient Greeks, for example, buried their dead in coffins carved from a special limestone that was supposed to speed decomposition. As a result, these coffins were called sarkophagi, or “flesh-eaters” (from the Greek sarx, meaning “flesh,” and phagos, meaning “to eat”). The word sarcophagus subsequently came to mean any stone coffin.

  Thomas Holmes

  Calling someone the “father” of his particular field is the highest professional accolade that can be bestowed on a man. There’s the father of medicine (Hippocrates), the father of history (Herotodus), and the father of geometry (Euclid). In the field of mortuary science, that honorific belongs to the legendary Thomas Holmes—the father of modern embalming.

  Biographical facts about Holmes’s early life are sketchy. A native New Yorker, he was born in 1817 into a well-to-do mercantile family and appears to have developed an early interest in medicine. He attended the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University in the early 1840s, though whether or not he received a degree is a matter of debate among his biographers. According to some sources, he was expelled before graduation because of his habit of removing cadavers from the dissection room for his own personal investigations.

  In any event—with or without a degree—he managed to wangle a position as examining physician in the city’s coroner’s office, a job that afforded him an ample supply of cadavers for study. He remained there for several years until, at the age of thirty, he married, moved to Brooklyn, and established a thriving family practice in his Williamsburg neighborhood. By then, he had also begun experimenting with innovative embalming techniques.

  Until the mid-nineteenth century, the most common methods for preserving dead bodies in the United States were either ice refrigeration or treating the body with compounds such as arsenic, mercury, and zinc, whose toxic fumes made them hazardous to handle. Holmes not only concocted a more efficacious (and much safer) embalming fluid—guaranteed, or so he claimed, to preserve bodies “forever, or at least as long as stone”—but also patented a pump for injecting it into the cadaver’s arteries.

  Early embalmers occasionally displayed their handiwork in public, as portrayed in these panels from Rick Geary’s graphic novel, Lower Broadway. Courtesy of Rick Geary.

  He began to publicize his new technique in 1850, when he put one of his embalmed subjects on display in a lower Manhattan “undertaker’s store.” Thanks to extensive press coverage, the exhibit became a citywide sensation, drawing thousands of spectators.

  It was the Civil War, however, that really made his reputation. In 1861, Holmes was in Washington, D.C., when Colonel Elmer E. Ellsworth, a close friend of Abraham Lincoln’s, became the first prominent casualty of the conflict. Invited to handle the embalming, Holmes did such an impressive job that when the body was laid out in the East Room of the White House, the dignitary escorting Mary Lincoln declared that Ellsworth looked absolutely “natural, as though he were sleeping a brief and peaceful sleep.”

  Holmes’s success earned him a commission as an official “embalmer-surgeon” for the military. There was an urgent need for a man of his skills. Thousands of young soldiers were dying far from their homes. The arterial injection embalming method pioneered by Holmes made it possible to keep their bodies in a decent state of preservation during the long voyage back to their families.

  Of course, there were only so many casualties he and his assistants could handle. He soon had plenty of competitors who employed his techniques while aggressively (not to say shamelessly) promoting their own services. Some posted handbills along the roadsides, where passing troops would be sure to see them. Others sent employees to the front lines to distribute circulars complete with prices ($50 for an officer, $25 for an enlisted man, coffins included). Still others ran newspaper ads with attention-grabbing slogans:

  Bodies Embalmed by Us

  NEVER TURN BLACK

  But retain their natural color

  and appearance!

  Little wonder that one Union general put a stop to these “ghastly advertisements” since they were having such a “demoralizing influence” on his men.

  Before the war ended, Holmes himself had resigned his commission and opened a private business in Washington, charging twice as much as his less-renowned rivals to embalm, box, and ship a body home. In later years, he estimated that between 1861 and 1865, he had personally embalmed “4,028 soldiers and officers, field and staff.”

  Back in Brooklyn after the war, Holmes—who was then operating a neighborhood drugstore—continued to experiment with his embalming fluid. Dissatisfied with his original formula—which had a tendency to distort the features of his subjects—he eventually concocted a new and improved brand that he called Innominata and sold for $3 a gallon. The show window of his pharmacy was an attention grabber, featuring prominent signs for both his embalming fluid and a homemade root beer he had perfected in his lab. There was also a preserved human arm on a marble slab.

  After his death in 1900, workmen found a number of bodies buried in his cellar. At first, Holmes was suspected of having been a homicidal maniac, but the police quickly determined that the corpses—most of them young children and infants—had been legally obtained from the city morgue and used as subjects for his experiments. In accordance with his last wishes, Holmes himself—who believed to the last that no one besides himself could do a decent job of preserving the dead—was buried unembalmed.

  RECOMMENDED READING

  If you can get hold of it (which is easier than it used to be, now that the entire run of the magazine is available on CD), there’s a fine, lively bio of Holmes—“That Was New York: The First Embalmer” by Trentwell Mason White and Ivan Sandrof—in the November 7, 1942, issue of the New Yorker.

  Equal-Opportunity

  Embalming

  During the early years of the American embalming business, the vast majority of practitioners were white guys. Even back then, however, there were a few notable exceptions—pioneering death workers who brought a bit of diversity to the trade.

  During the Civil War, when the process of arterial injection embalming first became popularized through the efforts of Thomas Holmes and other military embalmer-surgeons, an African American slave named Prince Greer arrived at the Nashville home of a Tennessee undertaker named W. P. Cornelius. Inside Greer’s buckboard was the body of his master, one Colonel Greer, a member of a Texas cavalry regiment who had been slain in battle. Fulfilling his master’s dying wish, Greer asked Cornelius to embalm the body so that it could be shipped back home to Texas.

  Once the job was done, Prince Greer asked if he could remain at Cornelius’s premises and indicated that he would be willing to perform whatever chores were required to earn his room and board. Cornelius—who had just lost the services of his assistant, a young army doctor named E. C. Lewis who had been trained by Holmes himself—offered to teach Greer how to embalm. The results were later described by Cornelius in his memoirs:

  Prince Greer appeared to enjoy embalming so much that he himself became an expert, kept on at work embalming during the balance of the war and was very successful at it. It was but a short time before he could raise an artery as quickly as anyone and was always careful, always of course coming to me in a difficult case. He remained with me until I quit the business in 1871.

  What became of Pr
ince Greer in later years is unknown, but his work with Cornelius makes him the first documented African American embalmer in U.S. history.

  Women took a bit longer to break into the business. Perhaps the most important early female embalmer was Mme. Lina D. Odou (1853—1919). The daughter of a French diplomat, Odou had a cosmopolitan upbringing, traveling with her family around the capitals of Europe. While living in London in 1868, she met and befriended Florence Nightingale, who became a mentor to the fifteen-year-old girl. After training as a nurse, Odou served with the Red Cross in France, then spent several years working privately for various aristocratic families throughout Europe.

  It was during this period that she became aware of a pressing need for women embalmers. Victorian prudery was at its height. To many people, the thought of a male embalmer handling the unclothed body of a beloved female relative was unacceptable. “Over and over again,” Odou later explained, “I heard mothers ask undertakers if they could not furnish women embalmers for their dead daughters, and many others to whom the dead are sacred asked the same question.” Odou resolved to master the skill herself.

  After studying in Switzerland, she moved to the United States, where she continued her training under some of the leading figures in the burgeoning field of mortuary education, including Auguste Renouard and A. Johnson Dodge, founders of two of the earliest schools of embalming in the United States. By 1901, Odou had formed a partnership with the famed New York City undertaker Frank E. Campbell and, in early 1901, opened the Lina D. Odou Embalming Institute at Campbell’s funeral establishment on West Twenty-third Street in Manhattan.

  In the following years, Odou and her assistants handled all the female corpses at Campbell’s. At the same time, she became a forceful advocate for the education of female undertakers, publishing editorials on the subject in trade journals and founding the Women’s Licensed Embalmer Association. Her example inspired other pioneers in the field, including Mrs. E. G. Bernard of Newark, New Jersey, and Lena R. Simons of Syracuse, New York, both of whom founded embalming schools of their own.

  Unsung Heroes

  of the Death Industry:

  Roy F. McCampbell

  Back in the early years of the twentieth century, when electricity was transforming the world, countless Thomas Edison wannabes were cranking out all kinds of electrical contraptions. Marketed under impressive-sounding, pseudo-scientific names—the Dynamizer, the Spectro-Chrome, the Electro-Magneto Resonator—these crackpot devices were touted as miracle cures for everything from baldness and backaches to blindness and cancer.

  Quack healers weren’t the only ones devising bizarre, futuristic gizmos. In the 1920s, one enterprising Chicago undertaker got in on the act. His name was Roy F. McCampbell, and he occupies a special place in the annals of embalming as the first (and, so far as is known, only) person ever to try preserving a human body by means of electrical current.

  According to an article in the May 1923 issue of the trade magazine Undertaker’s Journal, McCampbell, after years of “laborious toil,” had succeeded in manufacturing a machine that could mummify a cadaver at the flip of a switch. After experimenting on a bunch of cats and dogs, he tried out his device on a human subject, the male “victim of a fatal gunshot wound.” The powerful electrical currents not only caused the complete dehydration of the corpse—reducing its weight by fully one-fifth—but (according to McCampbell) “positively killed” all the bacteria conducive to putrefaction. The results were impressive: a beautifully preserved (if somewhat shrunken) body with a face that “retained its naturalness.”

  Measuring seven feet in height, eight feet in length, and more than three feet in width, the one-and-a-half-ton apparatus was, as the article put it, “not of a portable nature.” An accompanying photograph depicts something that resembles an MRI machine in the shape of a Medici tomb: an enormous white sarcophagus with a sliding body-tray and an instrument panel full of dials, gauges, and switches.

  Besides the convenience of the process, McCampbell proudly proclaimed its great economy, estimating that—“when figured in terms of kilowatt hours”—the approximate cost for embalming a full-grown adult body was “eighteen to twenty-five cents.” Sadly, this groundbreaking invention never caught on, and McCampbell’s prototype seems to have vanished forever.

  Embalming:

  Don’t Try This at Home

  Undertakers will tell you that embalming is both an art and a science (though their concept of “art” tends to be a tad different from yours and mine; as one standard textbook puts it, “The art of embalming is the raising of the vessel, but the science of embalming is knowing which vessel to raise”). In any case, it’s a complex procedure that can be performed only by a board-licensed practitioner who has graduated from an accredited mortuary school and put in one to two years of apprenticeship at a funeral home.

  Though no two cases are alike—a body afflicted with crippling arthritis presents different problems from, say, the autopsied corpse of a shotgun victim—the basic steps of embalming are as follows:

  Don the appropriate protective gear: waterproof bodysuit, surgical cap, latex gloves, shoe covers, gauze mask, and plastic goggles.

  Place the body on a stainless steel or porcelain embalming table. (Make sure the person is actually dead. Having a body leap up with a howl when the first needle is inserted can be very disconcerting for everyone involved.)

  Remove all clothing and valuables from the body, including jewelry, religious articles, and expensive Swiss watches. Resist any temptation to pocket the last. (Remember your embalmer’s code of ethics!)

  Disinfect the body by spraying or sponging it with a strong disinfectant solution, then scrub it with germicidal soap. Shampoo the hair, clean under the fingernails, swab out the mouth and nasal passages. Shave the face clean of hair (even on women and children), unless the corpse sports a particular style of facial adornment—whiskers, goatee, walrus moustache, et cetera—in which case you should trim it neatly.

  Arrange the body into the position you wish it to assume in the coffin. Since rigor mortis will have already set in, this entails massaging the muscles and flexing the limbs to make them more pliable for manipulation. The head should be elevated on a rubber block (which will ultimately be replaced by a casket pillow) and tilted slightly to the right, so that when the mourners approach the open casket at the time of the viewing they will see the full face of the deceased, not simply the profile.

  Close and secure the eyes so that the person seems to be sleeping peacefully. This is done by inserting a plastic, lens-shaped “eyecap” under each lid. Little spurs on the cap hold the lids in place. For extra insurance, you may also superglue the upper and lower lids together, taking care not to mess up the eyelashes.

  Close and secure the mouth by the method of your choice. The most common involves a spring-activated “needle injector”—a kind of surgical staple gun that shoots wired barbs deep into the upper and lower gums, allowing the jaws to be drawn shut. The mouth can then be worked into a natural position using cotton, creams, and mortuary putty

  This completes the preparation stage of the procedure. You may now proceed with the actual embalming. There are two stages to the process. The first is known as arterial embalming: replacing the blood with formaldehyde-based preservative. After filling the tank of your embalming machine with your favorite brand of fluid, select a suitable spot on the body—for example, the left side of the neck near the collarbone—and make an incision with a sharp scalpel. Then, using a wire hook, probe the gash until you have located the carotid artery and gently pull this vessel to the surface. (This will be your injection site.) Now do the same with the neighboring jugular vein. (This will serve as the drainage vessel.)

  Insert the injection tube of the embalming machine into the exposed artery and a drainage hose into the vein. Hit the on switch to start the machine pumping. As the embalming solution circulates through the arteries, the blood will be forced out through the veins, exit via the drainage hos
e into the gutter of the embalming table, and disappear down a porcelain basin (or “slop sink”) hooked directly to the municipal sewer system.

  Once the blood has been completely exchanged for embalming fluid, the arterial tube and drainage hose are removed, the blood vessels tied off, and the incision at the base of the neck sutured. It is now time for stage two: suctioning out the goop from the body’s internal organs and replacing it with preservative—a process known as cavity embalming.

  Take your trocar (a long, hollow metal tube that terminates in an arrowlike point and is connected at the other end to an electric pump known as an aspirator) and thrust it into the corpse’s abdomen. Poke it around so that it punctures each of the internal organs in turn—heart, lungs, stomach, colon, intestines, liver, and bladder—and suck out the contents.

  Once you have vacuumed out the viscera, remove the trocar, disconnect it from the aspirator, and attach the hose to a bottle of formaldehyde. Shove the trocar back into the abdomen and flood the cavity with the fluid. Remove the trocar and close the unsightly external puncture holes either by suturing them or by plugging them with threaded plastic doodads known as “trocar buttons.” Pack the anus and (where appropriate) vagina with phenol-soaked cotton. Rewash and dry the body.

  The embalming is now complete and the cadaver is ready to receive the undertaker’s final and most artful ministrations: the cosmetic “restoration” intended to transform even the most gruesomely deformed cadaver into a handsome semblance of its formerly living self—a “beautiful memory picture,” in the lingo of the trade.