A Quick Lesson In Do-It-Yourself Embalming

by Gus McLeavy

From "The Bathroom Almanac" by Gus McLeavy (Frederick Fell Publishers, Inc.)

To begin, you'll need three to six gallons of embalming fluid. If you can't find a brand name fluid you can mix your own, using dyed and perfumed formaldehydes, glycerine, borax, phenol, alcohol, and water. The proportions aren't too important to the finished product, as Dr. Jesse Carr will explain later.

First of all, the mouth must be sewn together at the inside of the lips. (The needle is brought out through the nostril, usually the left one.) Then you take a trocar, a long hollow needle attached to a tube. Drain the contents of the abdominal and chest cavities, and replace the removed matter with cavity fluid. Pump out the circulatory system, replace the blood and plasma with the enbalming solution, and that's about it. In eight to ten hours the tissues will be firm and dry, and ready for 'cosmetic restoration.'

Careful, though! Regular enbalming fluid works differently on various bodies according to the cause of death. While it will give a pleasant pink glow to the flesh of a victim of carbon monoxide poisoning, when it is used on someone who died of jaundice it imparts a green tinge that requires a lot of make-up to conceal.

Although it is widely believed to preserve a buried body, embalming in fact does no such thing. If it has any worthwhile purpose at all, it is to make the open casket funeral more palatable. Dr. Jesse Carr is no friend of the mortuary industry, but he is a former chief of pathology at San Francisco General Hospital and Professor of Pathology at the University of California Medical School, and here's what he has to say about it: An exhumed body is a repugnant, moldy, foul-looking object. It's not the image of one who has been loved... The body itself may be intact, as far as contours and so on; but the silk lining of the casket is all stained with body fluids, the wood is rotting, and the body is covered with mold... If you seal up a casket so it is more or less airtight, you seal in the anaerobic bacteria - the kind that thrive in an airless atmosphere, you see. These are the putrefactive bacteria, and the results of their growth are pretty horrible... You're better off with a shroud, and no casket at all.