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— Smoke Gets in Your Eyes - Caitlin Doughty
==Undertaking emerged as a profession, though the job entailed little more than selling funeral props and decorations.
The local undertaker might build you a coffin, rent you a hearse or funeral carriage, or sell you mourning clothes or jewelry.
They often took other jobs to supplement their income, leading to some amusing nineteenth-century ads: “John Jensen: Undertaker, Tooth Puller, Lamp Lighter, Frame Builder, Blacksmith, Cabinetmaker.” Then came the American Civil War, the deadliest war in United States history.
The Battle of Antietam on September 17, 1862, holds the dubious honor of having been the Civil War’s (and American history’s) single bloodiest day, during which 23,000 men died on the battlefield, their maggot-ridden corpses bloated amidst the equally bloated bodies of horses and mules.
When the 137th Pennsylvania Regiment arrived four days later, its leader requested that his men be allowed to consume liquor as they buried the bodies, there being only one state in which it was possible to do the job: drunk.
During the four years of battles between the North and South, many of the soldiers’ families had no way to retrieve their dead sons and husbands from the battlefields.
The corpses could be transported on trains, but after a few days in the Southern summer heat, the dead entered the deepest throes of decomposition.
The smell emanating from a body left in the sun would have been far worse than a mere olfactory inconvenience.
According to the account of a doctor for the Union army, “during the battle of Vicksburg the two sides called for a brief armistice because of the stench of corpses disintegrating in the hot sun.”== Transporting bodies hundreds of miles in this odious condition was a nightmare for train conductors, even the most patriotic among them.
Railroads began refusing to transport bodies not sealed in expensive iron coffins—not a viable option for most families.
==The situation brought out the entrepreneurial impulses of men, who, if a family could pay, would perform a new preservative procedure called embalming—right there on the battlefield.
They followed the skirmishes and battles looking for work, America’s first ambulance chasers.
Competition was fierce, with stories of embalmers burning down one another’s tents and placing advertisements in local papers reading, “Bodies Embalmed by Us NEVER TURN BLACK.” To market the effectiveness of their services, the embalmers would display real preserved bodies they had plucked from the unknown dead, propping the corpses up on their feet outside the tents to better demonstrate their talents.
The embalming tents on the battlefield often contained only a simple plank of wood atop two barrels.
The embalmers injected chemicals into the arterial systems of the newly dead, their own special blends of “arsenicals, zinc chloride, bichloride of mercury, salts of alumina, sugar of lead, and a host of salts, alkalies, and acids.” Dr.
Thomas Holmes, still regarded by many in the funeral industry as the patron saint of embalming, maintained that during the Civil War he personally embalmed more than 4,000 dead soldiers in this fashion, at the cost of $100 a body.
The discount option, for those not inclined toward the highbrow methods of chemicals and injections, might be to eviscerate the internal organs and fill the body cavity with sawdust.
Defiling the body in this way was considered a sin in both the Protestant and Catholic traditions, but the desire to see the face of a loved one again sometimes trumped religious ideology.
The full evisceration of the body cavity is not so different from what is done today, minus the sawdust.
Perhaps the dirtiest secret about the process of modern embalming is the occult use of a skinny, lightsaber-sized piece of metal known as the trocar.
Bruce raised his trocar like the sword Excalibur and pushed its pointed tip into Cliff’s stomach, stabbing him just below his belly button.
He jabbed the trocar in, breaking the skin, and went to work puncturing Cliff’s intestines, bladder, lungs, and stomach.
The trocar’s job in the embalming process is to suck out any fluids, gases, and waste in the body cavity.
The brown liquid slid up the trocar’s tube with an uncomfortable gurgling and sucking noise before splashing down the drain of the sink and into the sewers.
Then the trocar reversed directions, no longer sucking but dumping more salmon-pink cocktail, of an even stronger chemical concentration this time, into the chest cavity and abdomen.
If there had been any doubt Cliff was dead, the trocar dispelled it.==