Preserving Corpses | National Geographic

I think a lot of people are afraid of
death there’s always still that
underlying fear that everyone has is to
you know is there gonna is it gonna be
painful or you know scarier or how am I
gonna die
it’s the mystery of the unknown that
scares people I think to understand how
many Americans deal with their dead
there may be no better place to visit
than the oldest embalming school in the
u.s. the Cincinnati College of mortuary
science or CCMS since 1882 generation
after generation of morticians and
training have come to CCMS to become
experts in the american rituals of death
and burial my friends when I told him
that I was going into the funeral
business they all just kind of give me
the same look like you want to work with
dead people erricka Kaiser’s uncle owns
a funeral home where she worked during
college there’s so many ghost stories
and misconceptions about the the field
that and people are just too afraid to
find out what it’s all about
all cultures have ways of handling dead
bodies but most american christians
don’t realize that how they treat their
dead makes them different from nearly
every other culture in the world america
is one of the few places where corpses
are routinely embalmed american funeral
directors know that their clients want
the dead to look as they did in life I
think in the eyes of a family they want
to see their loved one in a very natural
peaceful state in the US the goal of
embalmers is not just a disguise
power but to stop its inevitable
destruction in its tracks
this body donated to the school is
already decomposing but Erica and her
classmates will stop the decay for as
long as a few years by injecting the
corpse with several gallons of a
chemical preservative based on
formaldehyde this American practice of
lutein Lee embalming the dead would be
taboo in many other cultures even in
mortuary school embalming is practically
a ritual with clearly defined steps
first the body is cleaned and prepped
mouths pleasure it’s crucial to get that
very natural next the embalmers locate
the blood vessel in which they will pump
the formaldehyde solution and you have
to work your way through that and go
ahead and cut the artery as the
embalming fluid enters the body it
displaces the blood which escapes
through an incision usually in the
jugular vein almost immediately the
corpse begins to harden this may seem
like a process dreamed up by a mad
scientist but in reality embalming has
deep historical and religious roots in
America embalming arose not from a quest
for immortality but from perhaps the
nation’s greatest tragedy the Civil War
modern embalming techniques had just
been invented when hundreds of thousands
of young men began dying on battlefields
far from home for the first time
soldiers families could request that the
bodies of their sons and husbands be
preserved and returned for burial there
were many who welcomed the new technique
as a godsend
many Christians saw embalming as a
perfect fit with their religious beliefs
in which the body and the spirit would
be reunited at the resurrection as
diverse as the rituals we practice to
honor the dead to heal our grief we
united in our need to mark this most
final all life
and to attempt to make sense of what
must remain a mystery