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Abstract
This paper presents the history and theory of nineteenth century preservation technologies that mechanically altered the human corpse. By theorizing the socio-historical affects of those technologies, the production of entirely new postmortem conditions for all dead bodies are suggested. These technologies of preservation effectively invented the modern corpse; transforming the dead body into something new: a photographic image, a train passenger, a dead body that looked alive. All of these technological innovations are matched by the emergence of an early twentieth century funeral industry that turned the preserved human corpse into a dead body that was atemporal. Once the human corpse could exist outside of the normal biological time that controlled the body's decomposition, it became a well-suited subject for unfettered public display. Dead bodies emerge in this paper as the products of nineteenth century human technologies that created a kind of embalmed vision that we living humans still use today, albeit without noticing, when looking at death.
Notes
[1] The Casket (1902). December, pp. 30 – 31. Copies of The Casket are in the archives of the National Funeral Directors Association in Milwaukee, WI.
[2] The Casket (1902). December, p. 30.
[3] Over the last 5 years books such as Roach, Citation2003, and Laderman, Citation2003, have been published and these texts certainly touch on the subject of the human corpse. It is interesting to note however that discussions of death rarely tackle how the changes made to the human corpse have also affected fields like thanatology.
[4] The President's Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical Behavioral Research (Citation1981) is an example of a text combing through the countless definitions of death in contemporary America.
[5] Here I am thinking specifically of Lyotard, Citation1984, and Jameson, Citation1991.
[6] According to Gilligan and Stueve (Citation1995), “The term ‘dead body’ means specifically the body of a human being deprived of life but not yet entirely disintegrated. The term ‘corpse’ is synonymous with the term ‘dead body.’ A body to be legally a dead body or corpse must meet three conditions: it must be the body of a human being, without life, and not entirely disintegrated” (p. 5). A human corpse that has decomposed to the point of organic remnants and/or become skeletal remains is no longer recognized as a dead body. Gilligan and Stueve give the following example from USA case law: “In State v. Glass, 27 O. App. 2d 214, 273 N.E. 2d 893, a real estate developer who had ordered bulldozers to level land upon which an old cemetery was located was charged with a violation of Ohio's ‘Grave Robbery’ statute. The site that was developed contained the graves of three persons buried about 120 years earlier. In reversing the conviction of the developer, the Appeals Court stated as follows: ‘A cadaver is not an everlasting thing. After undergoing an undefined degree of decomposition, it ceases to be a dead body in the eyes of the law,’” p. 5.
[7] I am not suggesting that the human corpse has had a seamless movement over the last 150 years, but rather that as the technologies affecting dead bodies have changed, so too have the postmortem conditions of death.
[8] The recent case of Terri Schiavo in Florida is an example of how the postmortem conditions of death have changed both biologically and politically over the last 20 years in America.
[9] Mediation and alteration of the human corpse by living humans is an ancient practice. The historical practices of mummification in different cultures around the world, as well as different kinds of burial practices, represent the explicit mediation of the dead body. In this paper, I am looking at specific nineteenth century mechanical technologies that produced a particular kind of postmortem subject in America. This is not to say other forms of mediation, such as, mummification, cremation, postmortem cannibalism, or deification should be rejected. A much longer and broader look at postmortem mediation would necessarily involve these aforementioned practices.
[10] The statistical scale of the numbers of bodies embalmed in late nineteenth century America are impossible to pin down. Not until the twentieth century did formal bookkeeping accurately document how many bodies were being embalmed.
[11] While I do not make explicit use of either Walter Benjamin's The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction or A short history of photography, both texts have been important in my thinking about death photography. Camera Lucida (Citation1980) by Roland Barthes is also an interesting reference for the question of death and photography.
[12] A few substantial books have been published on the subject of death (also called postmortem) photography. The following works are important for both their visual documentation of the images and the historical information associated with the practice of photographing the dead. These books include Jay Ruby's Secure the shadow (Citation1995), James Van Der Zee's Harlem book of the dead (Citation1978), Michael Lesly's Wisconsin death trip (Citation1973), and two books by Stanley Burns: Sleeping beauties: Memorial photography in America (Citation1990) and Sleeping beauty II: Grief, bereavement and the family in memorial photography (Citation2002).
[13] Gunning, Citation1995, p. 64. Gunning does an excellent job of detailing the growth of “spirit photography” during the nineteenth century. Spirit photographs were, as Gunning states “… produced as mourning images during the nineteenth century” (p. 66). To achieve this effect, photographers would superimpose one image over another to create the appearance of a ghost-like specter.
[14] Stanley Burns (Citation2002) talks briefly about the process of developing these images as well as the role of P. T. Barnum in debunking them.
[15] Ruby, Citation1995, p. 7. Ruby's book is an interesting synthesis and documentary source for the all kinds of postmortem photography, including both humans and pets.
[16] Ruby, Citation1995, p. 50. It's worth noting that an excellent source of African American postmortem photography from the early to mid twentieth century is James Van Der Zee's Harlem book of the dead.
[17] An excellent essay on the pre-photographic and pre-embalming spectacle of the human corpse is Schwartz, Citation1995. Pages 298 – 304 focus on the general public's fascination with looking at unclaimed corpses in the Paris Morgue.
[18] Habenstein & Lamers, Citation1996, p. 219. Because of both price gouging and poorly done battlefield embalming, the Union Army received a War Department General Order in March 1865, entitled the “Order Concerning Embalmers” which mandated using only licensed, competent embalmers for war dead. The Civil War ended a month later but the mandate was the first time any formal governmental licensing took effect. Habenstein and Lamers, Citation1996, discuss this entire history in their book, pp. 207 – 219.
[19] Barnes, Citation1896. Two other embalming textbooks from roughly the same period that offer excellent information on the subject of nineteenth century postmortem preservation are Myers, Citation1908, and Sullivan, Citation1887.
[20] Habenstein and Lamers talk about public resistance to embalming during both the pre- and post-Civil War years because of religious concerns. As they explain, “Public resistance to the mutilation of the remains, moreover, had the sanction of the Christian tradition that the body is the temple of God, and that the remains are always sacred and must in every case be treated with reverence.” See Habenstein & Lamers, Citation1996, p. 218. Because of the public concerns, funeral directors such as Barnes often compared their profession to doing “God's work.” Interestingly, in 1910 at the 7th Annual Conference of the Embalmers' Examining Boards of North America a Reverend John H. Nawn made address regarding the theological importance of the embalmers' work entitled “The Sacredness of Our Profession.” See Proceedings of the Seventh Annual Conference of Embalmers' Examining Boards of North America. (1910). Chicago, IL, pp. 6 – 8.
[21] Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Joint Conference of Embalmers' Examining Boards of North America. (1907). Norfolk, VA, pp. 9 – 10.
[22] Late nineteenth and early twentieth century funeral industry periodicals such as The Sunnyside, The Casket, and The Embalmer's Monthly are littered with stories about “fluid Men.”
[23] Proceedings of the Third Annual Meeting of Association of State and Provincial Boards of Health and Embalmers' Examining Boards of North America. (1906). Chicago, IL, p. 11.
[24] To offer a sense of how long and drawn out the process of developing the regulations for intercontinental shipment of dead bodies was, the National Association of General Baggage Agents first drew up suggested rules for shipping bodies in 1888. See Habenstein & Lamers, Citation1996, p. 319.
[25] The information about this meeting and the rules agreed upon by the different groups were reprinted in the Proceedings of the Third Annual Meeting of Association of State and Provincial Boards of Health and Embalmers' Examining Boards of North America. (1906). pp. 46 – 48.
[26] Proceedings of the Third Annual Meeting of Association of State and Provincial Boards of Health and Embalmers' Examining Boards of North America. (1906). Chicago, IL, pp. 46 – 47.
[27] Carl Lewis Barnes is one of the more colorful figures in the history of American embalming. Habenstein and Lamers refer to him as “that showman, Dr. Carl Lewis Barnes” (Habenstein & Lamers, Citation1996, p. 328) in their recounting of important figures in American Funeral Directing. In Mayer (Citation2000) he gives the following biographical sketch of Barnes: “Born into a family that operated an undertaking establishment in Connellsville, Pennsylvania, Barnes (1872 – 1927) studied medicine in Indiana, opened an embalming school there and moved it to Chicago. He manufactured embalming chemicals, wrote many books and articles on the subject, and had the largest chain of fixed-location schools in history in New York, Chicago, Boston, Minneapolis, and Dallas. While serving overseas as a medical colonel in the US Army in World War I, his businesses failed. He never reopened the schools, continuing the practice of medicine until his death,” p. 475.
[28] The Bisga Fluid advertisements ran in a series of embalming and funeral trade journals, namely The Casket and The Sunnyside from 1902 – 1903. These publications were not printed for reading by the general public, so it is doubtful that many people other than funeral directors or embalmers saw the adverts. What is unknown about the Bisga Man is where exactly Carl Lewis Barnes obtained the body. Barnes makes a brief reference to the man's corpse featured in the advertisements during a lecture in 1905 to the Connecticut Funeral Directors Association. According to a typewritten account of the lecture, Barnes says the following about embalming “difficult cases” (meaning bodies ravaged by disease or badly decomposing): “The best case I ever treated was a failure at the start. The body was that of a young man about 30 years of age.” (p. 15) Barnes alludes to the idea that the young man was killed by tuberculosis and that he had great difficulty injecting fluid into the dead body. After successfully embalming the body, Barnes explains “I used a picture of this subject in advertising 3 months after death. It [the body] would have gone to pieces in 3 days if it had not been so treated.” (p. 16). Everything else about the Bisga Man is somewhat of a mystery. Furthermore, this author has been unable to determine the etymology of the word “Bisga.” Carl Lewis Barnes left no clues or explicit information on how or why he invented the term.
[29] This statement is taken from a December 1902 version of the Bisga Man advertisement in The Casket. This advertisement is in the archives of the National Funeral Directors Association.
[30] Marketing is of course present in this case, as Carl Lewis Barnes wanted funeral directors to realize how good dead bodies could look using his products. Barnes ran another advertisement in 1906 for Bisga Embalming Fluid in which the selling point was the following line: “WAIT UNTIL THE Mercury Reaches 90 Degrees Fahrenheit, Then you will wish you had some BISGA.” This advertisement is in The Sunnyside.