The American Way of Death Revisited (23 page)

A “long, slow development, with its roots deep in the history of
Western civilization,” or a short, fast sprint with its roots deep in moneymaking? A brief look backward would seem to establish that there is no resemblance between the funeral practices of today and those of even seventy-five to one hundred years ago, and that there is nothing in the “history of Western civilization” to support the thesis of continuity and gradual development of funeral customs. On the contrary, the salient features of the contemporary American funeral (beautification of the corpse, metal casket and vault, banks of store-bought flowers, the ubiquitous offices of the “funeral director”) are all of very recent vintage in this country, and each has been methodically designed and tailored to extract maximum profit for the trade.

Nor can responsibility for the twentieth-century American funeral be laid at the door of “Judaeo-Christian beliefs.” The major Western faiths have remarkably little to say about how funerals should be conducted. Such doctrinal statements as have been enunciated concerning disposal of the dead invariably stress simplicity, the equality of all men in death, emphasis on the spiritual aspects rather than on the physical remains.

The Roman Catholic Church requires that the following, simple instructions be observed: “(1) That the body be decently laid out; (2) that lights be placed beside the body; (3) that a cross be laid upon the breast, or failing that, the hands laid on the breast in the form of a cross; (4) that the body be sprinkled with holy water and incense at stated times; (5) that it be buried in consecrated ground.” The Jewish religion specifically prohibits display in connection with funerals: “It is strictly ordained that there must be no adornment of the plain wooden coffin used by the Jew, nor may flowers be placed inside or outside. Plumes, velvet palls and the like are strictly prohibited, and all show and display of wealth discouraged; moreover, the synagogue holds itself responsible for the arrangements for burial, dispensing with the services of the Dismal Trade.” In Israel today, uncoffined burial is the rule, and the deceased is returned to the earth in a simple shroud. The Church of England’s
Book of Common Prayer
, written several centuries before burial receptacles came into general use, makes no mention of coffins in connection with the funeral service, but rather speaks throughout of the corpse or the “body.”

What of embalming, the pivotal aspect of the American funeral? The “roots” of this procedure have indeed leaped oceans and traversed
centuries in the most unrootlike fashion. It has had a checkered history, the highlights of which deserve some consideration since embalming is (as one mortuary textbook writer puts it) “the very foundation of modern mortuary service—the factor which has made the elaborate funeral home and lucrative funeral service possible.”

True, the practice of preserving dead bodies with chemicals, decorating them with paint and powder, and arranging them for a public showing has its origin in antiquity—but not in Judaeo-Christian antiquity. This incongruous behavior towards the human dead originated with the pagan Egyptians and reached its high point in the second millennium
B.C
. Thereafter, embalming suffered a decline from which it did not recover until it was made part of the standard funeral service in twentieth-century America.

While the actual mode of preservation and the materials used in ancient Egypt differed from those used in contemporary America, there are many striking similarities in the kind of care lavished upon the dead. There, as here, the goal was to outmaneuver the Grim Reaper as far as possible.

The Egyptian method of embalming as described by Herodotus sounds like a rather crude exercise in human taxidermy. The entrails and brain were removed, the body scoured with palm wine and purified with spices. After being soaked for seventy days in a saline solution, the corpse was washed and wrapped in strips of fine linen, then placed in a “wooden case of human shape” which in turn was put in a sepulchral chamber.

Restorative art was by no means unknown in ancient Egypt. The Greek historian Diodorus Siculus wrote: “Having treated [the corpse], they restore it to the relatives with every member of the body preserved so perfectly that even the eyelashes and eyebrows remain, the whole appearance of the body being unchangeable, and the cast of the features recognizable.… They present an example of a kind of inverted necromancy.” The Egyptians had no Post Mortem Restoration Bra; instead, they stuffed and modeled the breasts, refashioning the nipples from copper buttons. They fixed the body while still plastic in the desired attitude; they painted it with red ochre for men and yellow for women; they emphasized the details of the face with paint; they supplemented the natural hair with a wig; they tinted the nails with henna. A mummy of the XVIIIth Dynasty has even been found
wearing some practical burial footwear—sandals made of mud, with metal soles and gilded straps.

Egyptian preoccupation with preservation of the body after death stemmed from the belief that the departed spirit would one day return to inhabit the earthly body; that if the body perished, the soul would eventually perish too. Yet although embalming was available to all who could pay the price, it was by no means so universally employed in ancient Egypt as it is today in the USA. The ordinary peasant was not embalmed at all; yet, curiously enough, his corpse comes down to us through the ages as well preserved as those of his disemboweled and richly aromatic betters, for it has been established that the unusually dry climate and the absence of bacteria in the sand and air, rather than the materials used in embalming, are what account for the Egyptian mummies’ marvelous state of preservation. The Greeks, knowing the uses of both, were no more likely to occupy themselves with the preservation of dead flesh than they were to bury good wine for the comfort of dead bodies. They cremated their dead, for the most part, believing in the power of flame to set free the soul. The glorious period that conventional historians call the Golden Age of Greece is for historians of embalming the beginning of the Dark Ages.

The Jews frowned upon embalming, as did the early Christians, who regarded it as a pagan custom. Saint Anthony, in the third century, denounced the practice as sinful. His impassioned plea, recorded by Athanasius, might well be echoed by the American of today who would like to avoid being transformed by the embalmer’s art and displayed in a funeral home:

Mummification of the dead in Egypt was gradually abandoned after a large part of the population was converted to Christianity.

The eclipse of embalming was never quite total, however. The death of a monarch, since it is the occasion for a transfer of power, calls for demonstration, and it has throughout history been found politically expedient to provide visible evidence of death by exposing the body to public view. So embalming, of sorts, was used in Rome, and later throughout Europe, but only for the great and near-great, and by the very rich as a form of pretentiousness.

Alexander the Great is said to have been preserved in wax and honey; Charlemagne was embalmed and, dressed in imperial robes, placed in a sitting position in his tomb. Canute, too, was embalmed, and after him many an English monarch. Lord Nelson, as befits a hero, was returned to England from Trafalgar in a barrel of brandy. Queen Elizabeth, by her own wish, was not embalmed. Developments beyond her control caused her sealed, lead-lined coffin to lie in Whitehall for an unconscionable thirty-four days before interment. During this time, reports one of the ladies-in-waiting who sat as watchers, the body “burst with such a crack that it splitted the wood, lead, and cerecloth; whereupon the next day she was fain to be new trimmed up.”

Although embalming as a trade or cult was not resumed until this century, there prospered in every age charlatans and eccentrics who claimed to have rediscovered the lost art of the Egyptians or who offered new and improved pickling methods of their own invention. These were joined, in the eighteenth century, by French and English experimenters spurred by a quite different motive—the need for more efficient methods of preserving cadavers for anatomical studies.

The physicians, surgeons, chemists, and apothecaries who engaged in anatomical research were from time to time sought out by private necrophiles who enlisted their services to preserve dead friends and relations. There are many examples of this curious practice, of which perhaps the most interesting is the task performed by Dr. William Hunter, the celebrated eighteenth-century anatomist. Dr. Hunter was anyway something of a card. He once explained his aversion to contradiction by pointing out that, being accustomed to the “passive submission of dead bodies,” he could no longer easily tolerate having his will crossed; a sentiment echoed by Evelyn Waugh’s
mortuary cosmetician: “I was just glad to serve people that couldn’t talk back.” In 1775 Dr. Hunter and a colleague embalmed the wife of Martin Van Butchell, quack doctor and “super dentist,” the point being that Mrs. Van Butchell’s marriage settlement stipulated that her husband should have control of her fortune “as long as she remained above ground.” The embalming was a great success. The “preserved lady” (as curious sightseers came to call her) was dressed in a fine linen gown, placed in a glass-topped case and kept in the drawing room, where Van Butchell introduced her to all comers as his “Dear Departed.” So popular was the preserved lady that Van Butchell was obliged to insert a newspaper notice limiting her visiting hours to “any day between Nine and One, Sundays excepted.” When Van Butchell remarried several years later, his new wife raised strong objections to the presence of the Dear Departed in her front parlor and insisted upon her removal. Thereafter the Dear Departed was housed in the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons.
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The two widely divergent interests which spurred the early embalmers—scientific inquiry, and the fascination and financial reward of turning cadavers into a sort of ornamental keepsake—were to achieve a happy union under the guiding hand of a rare nineteenth-century character, “Dr.” Thomas Holmes. He was the first to advance from what one funeral trade writer jocularly calls the “Glacier Age”—when preservation on ice was the undertakers’ rule—and is often affectionately referred to by present-day funeral men as “the father of American embalming.” Holmes was the first to popularize the idea of preserving the dead on a mass scale, and the first American to get rich from this novel occupation.

Holmes developed a passionate interest in cadavers early in life (it was in fact the reason for his expulsion from medical school; he was forever carelessly leaving them around in inappropriate places), and when the Civil War started, he saw his great opportunity. He rushed to the front and started embalming like mad, charging the families of
the dead soldiers $100 for his labors. Some four years and 4,028 embalmed soldiers later (his own figure), Holmes returned to Brooklyn a rich man.

The “use for everyone of a casket that is attractive and protects the remains” (attractive seems an odd word here) is a new concept in this century, and one that took some ingenuity to put across. Surprisingly enough, even the widespread use of any sort of burial receptacle is a fairly new development in Western culture, dating back less than two hundred years. Until the eighteenth century, few people except the very rich were buried in coffins. The “casket,” and particularly the metal casket, is a phenomenon of modern America, unknown in past days and in other parts of the world.

As might be expected with the development of industrial technique in the nineteenth century, coffin designers soared to marvelous heights. They experimented with glass, cement, celluloid, papier-mâché, India rubber; they invented Rube Goldberg contraptions called “life signals”—complicated arrangements of wires and bells designed to set off an alarm if the occupant of the coffin should have inadvertently been buried alive.

The newfangled invention of metal coffins in the nineteenth century did not go unchallenged. An admonition on the subject was delivered by Lord Stowell, judge of the Consistory Court of London, who in 1820 was called upon to decide a case felicitously titled
Gilbert v. Buzzard
. At issue was the right to bury a corpse in a newly patented iron coffin. The church wardens protested that if parishioners were to get into the habit of burying their dead in coffins made proof against normal decay, in a few generations there would be no burial space left.

Said Lord Stowell, “The rule of law which says that a man has a right to be buried in his own churchyard is to be found, most certainly, in many of our authoritative text writers; but it is not quite so easy to find the rule which gives him the rights of burying a large chest or trunk in company with himself.” He spoke approvingly of attempts to abolish use of sepulchral chests “on the physical ground that the dissolution of bodies would be accelerated, and the dangerous virulence of the fermentation disarmed by a speedy absorption of the noxious particles into the surrounding soil.”

The inexorable upward thrust towards perfection in metal caskets
was not, however, destined to be halted by judicial logic. Just one hundred years after the decision in
Gilbert v. Buzzard
, a triumph of the first magnitude was recorded by the D. H. Hill Casket Company of Chicago, and described in their 1920
Catalogue of Funeral Merchandise:
“A Study in Bronze: When Robert Fulton said he could propel a boat by steam his friends were sure he was mentally deranged—that it could not be done. When Benjamin Franklin said he could draw electricity from the clouds his acquaintances thought he was crazy—that it could not be done. When our designing and manufacturing departments said they could and would produce a
CAST BRONZE CASKET
that would be the peer of anything yet developed, their friends and associates shook their heads sympathetically, feeling that it would be a hopeless task. All three visions have come to be realities—the steamboat, electricity, and the Hilco Peerless Cast Bronze Burial Receptacle.”