After We Die: The Life and Times of the Human Cadaver

6. Eternal Preservation of the Deceased: Literally and Figuratively

119 Why spend thousands of dollars in health club fees while you’re alive, then let everything go to pot just because you’ve died? Summum Bonum Amon “Corky” Ra, a mortician who offers mummification services, as quoted in Ron Laytner, “The Mummy Makers” Chapter 6 Eternal Preservation of the Deceased Literally and Figuratively The common forms of cadaver disposal leave few remains in the end. Cremation reduces a corpse to about seven pounds of nonorganic dust. A buried corpse gradually decomposes into a dark, moldy, undifferentiated mass. Contrary to popular belief, typical modern embalming postpones decomposition of the human corpse only for days or weeks. Within twelve years the buried cadaver will deteriorate to a moldy mass and, over an additional span of years, will become skeletonized. Increased amounts of embalming fluid can extend the period before decomposition , but would leave a corpse distorted in initial facial configuration, body shape, and skin tone. Can human flesh be prevented from decaying and dissolving? Are there ways to preserve all or a substantial portion of a cadaver in an aesthetically acceptable condition for an indefinite period? The whole idea of eternal preservation may seem to be a vainglorious conceit (and perhaps it is for those rich and famous persons who seek eternal preservation of their remains). It seems presumptuous to think that the world needs or wants a cadaver—a desiccated and highly debilitated version of a previous self—preserved for the indefinite future. There are, however, reasons besides conceit explaining why some people seek permanent preservation of their cadaver. Some religious believers think that a future resurrection of their corpse or a reunification of their body and soul will occur and that the event would be facilitated by preservation of their bodily form. Even without religious grounding, some people consider their lasting remains as a testimonial or a reminder to survivors of their existence. For them, eternal preservation “holds out hope that death will not be the end of us, 120 | Eternal Preservation of the Deceased that there is some salvation from the final annihilation that we fear awaits us all.”1 Other people think that science will eventually succeed in revivifying the essence of a person and that their bodily form will be useful in that process. That is a central object of the cryonics (freezing a cadaver) movement. Some people want to live forever, and they think that preservation of their corpse might ultimately promote that goal. Still others simply feel a strong revulsion at the prospect of postmortem bodily disintegration and therefore wish to avoid that fate. Sometimes people other than the decedent have reasons to seek indefinite preservation of human remains. In nineteenth-century medical schools, specimens of diseased organs, limbs, and tissue were kept in preservative-filled, sealed jars or cases and were used for medical education , for research, or as curiosities.2 Preserved corporeal specimens are still on display, usually in formaldehyde-filled jars but sometimes embedded in clear plastic, in medical museums like the Mutter Museum of the College of Physicians in Philadelphia. Northwestern University’s medical school museum displays 170 jars containing anomalous fetuses and newborns, including one newborn with a huge cyclops eye and another with a nose like a penis.3 Cornell’s psychology department still stores seventy brains remaining from an original collection of six hundred brains once studied to try to find correlations between certain human characteristics and brain size or structure.4 Surgeons and pathologists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries also kept preserved specimens of pathological or anomalous body parts on display in their medical offices or laboratories as educational tools, symbols of medical expertise, or curiosities. Some of these preserved body parts derived from surgery and others from autopsies. Into the 1970s, pathologists sometimes retained (for display, teaching, or research ) organs or tissue extracted during autopsies.5 Financial gain provided another motive for keeping and displaying cadavers or anatomical specimens. In the mid-eighteenth century “Egyptologists ” unrolled mummies in front of curious paying customers. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, entrepreneurs created nonmedical “museums” that displayed exotic skeletal remains or deformed body parts in an effort to attract and titillate a paying public.6 What was purported to be Napoleon’s penis—which by then looked like a maltreated shoelace or a shriveled eel—was once displayed in the Mu- Eternal Preservation of the Deceased | 121 seum of French Art in...