Embalming: Pre and Post
Technologies devised by humans to retard or halt the decomposing of organic material have been serving a double purpose since ancient times. On the one hand, by preventing foods from spoiling, they prolonged life. These technologies also ‘prolonged death’ by preventing bodies from decaying. Thus, the evolution of techniques utilized in burial parallels the history of food preservation. The kitchen technologies that were duplicated for the graveyard include salting, pickling, freezing, drying, honey curing, flaying, bleedings, and eviscerating. They were all practiced by the earliest Mediterranean civilizations to preserve both meats and the dead.
This observation is crucial to appreciating the counter-burial procedures proposed byJae Rhim Lee. As William Bryant Logan notes in his book, Dirt: Ecstatic Skin of the Earth, “None of these practices destroyed the soil, though they retarded the work of the decomposers.” Logan explains that it was Thomas Holmes, who introduced a technology that would not be useful in food preservation because it was so toxic. Holmes was a mortician in the Civil War. He made a fortune after he discovered that if the dead bodies of Union officers were injected with formaldehyde, they could be shipped home for burial without decomposing before they arrived. As he notes, a dead body is not toxic, even when it is decaying. It is not toxic when earlier methods of preservation were utilized. But a body injected formaldehyde is destroys soil. He made his fame as the father of embalming, and his fortune by poisoning the dirt. Lee’s efforts to reverse this practice highlights that his approach to managing human corpses continues the rampage against the environment of current life styles into death.