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Bodily Fluids: A Visual Guide to Embalming from 1897
06.02.2016
09:44 am
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I attended a lot of funerals when I was a kid. A consequence of coming from a large extended Catholic family. My father was the eldest of nine children—he outlived them all. During my childhood, his brothers and sisters, and a few of their cousins and kin, died within a very short time of each other. My mother came from a small Protestant family. Her parents, uncles and aunts lived longer than my father’s kin, but when they died they fell within a year or two of each other.

At most of these funerals the body of the deceased was displayed in an open casket—either in a chapel of rest or at home where the family said decades of the rosary around the coffin. Seeing a corpse never seemed strange—death was part of life. The only thing that did seem odd was the strange almost pained expressions on the faces of the deceased. I put this down to their being embalmed—but never quite understood what this entailed or how the undertakers managed to keep the deceased’s eyes closed or their mouths shut.

When my beloved great aunt died, the undertaker left a few startling clues to the secret processes of making a corpse presentable.

Although she wore little make-up, someone had rendered her as an embarrassed spinster ashamed for causing such an unnecessary to-do. Her cheeks were flaming red, her lips fuchsia pink and her eyelids a cheapening smear of blue. This was a portrait of my great aunt by a Sunday painter overly influenced by Henri Matisse—it was garish and bright. Her eyes seemed wrong—flat and squint. I later found out eyelids are glued closed or covered with a flesh-colored plastic skin. Her mouth was pursed and I saw a telltale crimson thread with which her lips (her jaw) had been sewn or looped shut. Her hair was flat, as if she had been sleeping on her side. It wasn’t how my great aunt—ever meticulous and precise in her presentation—would have wanted to be remembered.

Embalming has been carried out by humans for some 5,000 to 6,000 years. The Egyptians made the greatest use of it—believing the preservation of a body somehow empowered the spirit after death. The brain and vital organs were scooped out and stored in jars. The interior of the corpse rubbed with herbs and preservatives before being wrapped in layers of linen cloth. Similar methods of embalming were carried out across Africa, Europe and China.

The modern methods of embalming developed as a result of discoveries made by the English physician William Harvey in the 1600s. Harvey determined the process of blood circulation by injecting fluids into corpses. Based on Harvey’s experimentation, two Scottish doctors William and John Hunter developed the process of embalming in the 1700s—offering their services to the public.

However, it was the slaughter caused during the American Civil War that led to embalming becoming popular with the public as families of soldiers killed on the battlefield wanted their loved ones’ bodies preserved for burial.

In 1897, Eliab Myers, M.D. and F. A. Sullivan wrote The Champion Text Book on Embalming. This book offered “Lecturers and Demonstrators in the Champion College of Embalming.” It was produced by the Champion Company from Springfield, Ohio, which manufacture equipment for use in embalming.

The Champion Text Book on Embalming gave the user a history of its subject and illustrated step-by-step guide to the process of successful embalming. From the draining of blood and bodily fluids to the dissection and removal of internal organs. The process explained in these atmospheric photographic plates is virtually the same as it is today.
 
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Fig. 15 Raising the brachial artery.
 
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Fig. 16 Injecting the arterial system through the radial artery.
 
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Fig. 17 Aspirating blood from the heart.
 
More tips on dealing with corpses from 19th century embalming techniques, after the jump…

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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06.02.2016
09:44 am
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Extreme embalming, because what is a corpse, if not a poseable action figure?
04.30.2014
11:46 am
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The “modern” and “enlightened” view of death is one of absolute materialist nihilism—there’s almost a competitive edge to it. “Just harvest my organs and burn me away!” exclaims one. “Throw me in a ditch and give me back to the earth!” one-ups the next. No one wants to appear sentimental, and the idea of anything other than a purely utilitarian approach to a corpse feels superstitious and anachronistic. I find the attitude a little self-serving—funerals are for the living, and mourners may be soothed by the ritual of a funeral or service of some sort.

In fact, I’m of the opinion that if you truly care for your surviving friends and family you’ll at least consider what New Orleans socialite Mickey Easterling did. Not only did the fabulously eccentric philanthropist request a grandiose, champagne-catered funeral, she left them with a diorama of her earthly remains! Easterling was displayed sporting lavish fashions, sitting in a garden setting mirroring her own back yard. The details are what gets me. Notice the cigarette at the end of of an elegant holder, the glass of champagne, and her broach—it spells “bitch. ” Fab. You. Less.

If the guests/mourners don’t appear put off by Easterling’s final request it might help to remember a few things. First of all, this is New Orleans, where the macabre has style. Second, Easterling was well-known for her joyous personality and free-spirited flair. She “wintered” in Morocco—using a season as a verb is the ultimate marker of a person enjoying their good fortune, in my opinion. And finally, this is not the first time New Orleans has bid farewell to a community staple with extreme embalming. Two years ago Lionel Batiste (vocalist, bass drummer and assistant leader of the Treme Brass Band), was displayed standing up, before his traditional New Orleans jazz procession/parade.

Maybe it’s a growing trend! We can only hope, right?
 

 
Via Paris Review

Posted by Amber Frost
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04.30.2014
11:46 am
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Morbid menagerie: The opulent death displays of Frederik Ruysch
04.01.2014
09:34 am
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The drawings you see are here are from Frederik Ruysch’s Thesaurus Animalium Primus, a ten-volume collection published between 1701 and 1716. Ruysch was a Dutch botanist and anatomist who was appointed chief instructor to all the midwives in Amsterdam in 1668. His position had never existed before, but if a woman wanted to continue her work as a midwife, she now had to be evaluated by Ruysch. Having formerly suffered a dearth of cadavers to study and preserve, he suddenly found himself with access to a profusion of dead babies.

Part scientist, part artist, and part absolute eccentric, Ruysch became famous for his beautiful and morbid displays of embalming and remains, arranging human and animal parts together in the sorts of elaborate scenes you see here. Though he was a respected scientist, these presentations were barely medical, and hardly scientific. The sculptures often positioned the bones of babies in impossible stagings—you’ll notice one weeps genteelly, with a handkerchief. And with the help of his daughter Rachel, a famous still-life painter in her own right, he adorned his works with hair, flowers, fish, plants, seashells, and lace.

Ruysch showed his creations in a private museum (entry free to doctors, paid to layman), and they quickly became world-famous. The museum wasn’t quite a sober affair either—Ruysch would arrange tongue-in-cheek exhibits, like the bones of a three-year-old-boy next to that of a parrot, with the insinuated joke of “time flies.” In 1697, Czar Peter the Great took a tour of Ruysch’s work and became so enamored with one of the specimens that kissed it. He eventually purchased the entirety of the museum. I’m unsure of Dutch cultural norms regarding death around the turn of the 18th century, but the fact that midwives had to answer to a man with a side business in death sculptures suggests, at the very least, a conflict on interest. Still the strange beauty of Ruysch’s work cannot be denied, nor can his scientific brilliance.

His pioneering embalming techniques are what made his work possible, and Peter the Great also paid quite handsomely for the secret recipe to his preservation fluid, an alcohol of clotted pig’s blood, Berlin blue and mercury oxide. A (false) rumor circulated that the sailors transporting Ruysch’s collection to Russia drank all his embalming fluid, but it actually arrived in whole, and some of Ruysch’s specimens are still in perfect condition today—a testament to his brilliance in preservation.
 

Jan van Neck’s “Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Frederick Ruysch,” where he appears to perform an autopsy for posterity. (1683)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
Via The Public Domain Review

Posted by Amber Frost
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04.01.2014
09:34 am
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