Embalming

• 1. Introduction

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  Embalming is the art and science of preserving human remains, a practice so old and so widespread that cultures on nearly every continent developed their own versions of it independently. The Chinchorro people of the Atacama desert were doing it as far back as 5000-6000 BCE. Ancient Egyptians had it refined into ritual by 3500 BCE. And a church in Vinnitsa, Ukraine, holds the glass-lidded coffin of a Russian surgeon who died in 1881, his body preserved using the very technique he himself invented. What makes a human body last? Who decided this was worth doing? And what happens in the quiet, clinical hours before a funeral that most people never witness? Those are the questions this documentary will follow.

• 2. Roots Across Cultures

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  Human bones covered in cinnabar, found at Osorno in Spain and estimated to be around 5,000 years old, represent the earliest known evidence of artificial preservation in Europe. Cinnabar is a vivid red mineral, and someone chose to coat those bones in it. The gesture, whatever its meaning, shows that the impulse to preserve the dead is not modern and not confined to any single civilization.

  In Egypt, the practice grew into something deeply theological. The ancient Egyptians believed mummification allowed the soul to return to the preserved body after death. The process involved removing organs, drawing moisture from tissues, and covering the body with natron, a naturally occurring mixture of desiccating salts found in the Wadi El Natrun, west of the Nile Delta. Over the dynastic period, this became a standardized ritual, not simply a preservation technique.

  Across the world, the impulse appeared independently. The Meroites, the Guanches, the Jivaro Indians, the Aztecs, the Toltecs, the Mayans, and Tibetan and southern Nigerian tribes all developed embalming in antiquity. In China, extraordinarily well-preserved remains from the Han dynasty period (206 BCE-220 CE) have been recovered at the Mawangdui Han tombs site, including the body of Xin Zhui. The fluids and methods used there are still unknown.

  By about 500 CE, artificial preservation had become widespread in Europe. The Middle Ages and the Renaissance opened what historians of the practice call the anatomists' period, shaped by medicine's growing need for cadavers and by the work of physicians like Peter Forestus (1522-1597) and Ambroise Pare (1510-1590). The first recorded attempts to inject the vascular system were made by Alessandra Giliani, who died in 1326. Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), Jacobus Berengar (1470-1550), Bartholomeo Eustachius (1520-1574), Reinier de Graaf (1641-1673), Jan Swammerdam (1637-1680), and Frederik Ruysch (1638-1731) all contributed procedures during this era.

• 3. The Hunters and a Notorious Display

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  William Harvey, the 17th-century English physician who first mapped the system of blood circulation, made his discoveries by injecting colored solutions into corpses. That same technique, turned toward the preservation of the dead, became the foundation of modern mortuary practice through the Scottish surgeon William Hunter.

  Hunter wrote a widely read report on the correct methods for arterial and cavity embalming. His brother John Hunter then made the practice commercial, advertising embalming services to the general public from the mid-18th century onward. One of John Hunter's more notorious clients was a dentist named Martin Van Butchell.

  When Van Butchell's wife Mary died on the 14th of January 1775, he had her embalmed not for private sentiment but as a business attraction. Hunter injected preservatives and color additives into the body to give a glow to the corpse's cheeks, replaced the eyes with glass, and dressed her in a fine lace dress. The body was set in a layer of plaster of Paris inside a glass-topped coffin and displayed in the window of Van Butchell's home. Many Londoners came to see it. A rumor circulated, possibly started by Van Butchell himself, that his wife's marriage certificate had specified he would only control her estate for as long as her body remained unburied. The story drew crowds and criticism in equal measure, and it captured exactly the tension that would follow embalming for decades: the line between preservation and spectacle.

• 4. War, Railways, and a Nation Convinced

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  Interest in embalming grew steadily through the 19th century, driven by a mix of sentiment and practicality. The railways made it possible for families to request burial in distant places, and mourners wanted time to gather and pay their respects beside a displayed body. Funerals themselves were becoming more elaborate, requiring preparation time that an unembalmed body could not accommodate.

  After Lord Nelson was killed at the Battle of Trafalgar, his body was preserved in brandy and spirits of wine mixed with camphor and myrrh. By the time of his state funeral in 1805, well over two months later, his body was still in excellent condition and described as completely plastic.

  The American Civil War, however, was what truly shifted public opinion in the United States. Servicemen died far from home, and families wanted the remains returned for local burial. The lengthy transport from battlefields made embalming not just desirable but necessary. Dr Thomas Holmes received a commission from the Army Medical Corps to embalm the corpses of dead Union officers so they could be returned to their families. The passage of Abraham Lincoln's body home for burial after his assassination in 1865 was made possible by embalming, and it brought the practice to wide public attention.

  Until the early 20th century, embalming fluids frequently contained arsenic. Beyond the environmental concern that arsenic from embalmed bodies might leach into groundwater, there was a legal complication: people suspected of murder by arsenic poisoning could argue that the poison levels in the body came from post-mortem embalming, not homicide. The solution arrived in 1855, when the Russian chemist Alexander Michailowitsch Butlerow discovered formaldehyde. Its preservative properties were noted quickly, and formaldehyde became the chemical foundation of modern embalming.

• 5. What Happens in the Mortuary

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  Modern embalming in a funeral home is a surgical procedure, though a minimally invasive one. It typically takes between two and four hours, though complex cases can run much longer. An embalming following an autopsy, an extreme trauma case, or the restoration of a long-bone donor can take several days.

  Before anything begins, the embalmer verifies permissions, reviews the medical certificate of death, and confirms the body's identity, usually by checking wrist or leg tags. The body is placed on a mortuary table in the supine position, head elevated. The embalmer then assesses the condition of the remains, noting rigor mortis, skin condition, any edema, intravenous injection sites, and other factors that will shape the procedure.

  Arterial embalming is the core step. Embalming chemicals are injected into the blood vessels, usually through the right common carotid artery. Blood and interstitial fluids are displaced and drain from the right jugular vein. A centrifugal pump drives the solution while the embalmer massages the body to break up circulatory clots and ensure even distribution. When a single injection and drainage point is used, this is called a single-point injection. More difficult cases require additional sites, and a six-point injection uses the two iliac or femoral arteries, the subclavian or axillary vessels, and the common carotids.

  Cavity embalming follows. A trocar is inserted through a small incision made two inches above and two inches to the right of the navel. The instrument punctures hollow organs and aspirates their contents, then delivers concentrated cavity chemicals through the diaphragm into the chest cavity. The incision is closed with sutures or a trocar button.

  Hypodermic embalming uses a needle and syringe to treat areas where arterial fluid has not reached. Surface embalming handles skin damage directly. Throughout the process, specific surgical incisions, feeding tubes, tracheotomy holes, blisters, fractured bones, and intravenous sites all receive individual attention, each with its own protocol for closure or repair.

  The embalming process always has three formal goals: sanitization, presentation, and preservation. Restoration is a significant additional factor in many cases.

• 6. Grooming the Deceased

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  The work of making a body presentable for viewing involves far more than most people imagine. Once arterial and cavity embalming are complete, the embalmer turns to restoring something that looks like the living person.

  A recent photograph of the deceased in good health is often the most important reference a mortician has. It guides decisions about hair styling, skin tone, and the expression of the features. The process of closing the mouth and eyes, shaving, and similar preparations is collectively called setting the features. The mouth may be closed via suturing, adhesive, or a needle injector that sets a wire into the maxilla and mandible, a device used primarily in North America.

  Mortuary cosmeticizing is not the same as applying makeup to a living person. Its purpose is to restore depth and dimension that the absence of blood circulation has removed. Warm areas where blood vessels lie near the surface in life, such as the cheeks, chin, and knuckles, receive subtle reds to recreate the effect. Browns are added to the eyelids to add depth, a consideration that matters especially because the perspective from inside a coffin is unusual. Pink-colored lighting near the body during a viewing can further warm the complexion.

  Blemishes, bruises, and discolorations that arterial injection cannot correct are addressed with phenol-based cauterants or hypodermic bleaching agents. Tissue builder chemicals, which become solid on contact with interstitial fluids, restore contours at the temples, on the face, and on the hands. In cases of natural depressions or trauma, these chemicals return regions of the face to the appearance the family expects to see.

  Clothing, too, follows cultural, religious, and family custom. In the Western world, men are commonly buried in business attire and women in semi-formal dress, though this has shifted in recent years toward whatever clothing the person wore in daily life. Military and law enforcement personnel are often dressed in uniform. Clergy wear their liturgical vestments. In parts of Asia and Europe, a specially designed shroud or burial cloth is preferred over clothing from daily life. Photographs, notes, and personal items are frequently placed in the coffin, and occasionally, bulkier items such as electric guitars find their way in as well.

• 7. Notable Preserved Bodies

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  Vladimir Lenin, who died in 1924, remains the most famous embalmed body of the 20th century. His remains continue to draw visitors to his Moscow mausoleum. Unlike the body of N. I. Pirogov, a Russian surgeon embalmed in 1881 using the technique he developed himself and left resting unchanged at room temperature in Vinnitsa, Ukraine, Lenin's body undergoes thorough maintenance twice a week in a special underground clinic and is kept at a constant low temperature.

  The scale of the communist world's embalming projects was striking. Joseph Stalin was embalmed and placed beside Lenin, but removed and buried in 1961 during de-Stalinization. Klement Gottwald of Czechoslovakia, who died just five days after attending Stalin's funeral, was embalmed and displayed in Prague's Vitkov National Monument, then removed and cremated in 1962 for political reasons. Bulgarian Georgi Dimitrov was buried in 1990 in the Central Cemetery of Sofia after the fall of communism. Embalmed leaders are still on display in the Mausoleum of Mao Zedong, the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum, and the Kumsusan Palace of the Sun for Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il.

  Not all notable embalming cases ended well. The botched embalming of Pope Pius XII (1876-1958) by a charlatan doctor accelerated rather than slowed decomposition. His body turned black, his nose fell off while lying in state, and the odor forced the Swiss Guards stationed around him to rotate shifts every 10 to 15 minutes. The doctor had also photographed the pontiff in his death throes with the intention of selling the images to tabloids; Italian tabloids refused to buy them, and John XXIII later banned him from entering the Vatican and prohibited all photography of a deceased pope until the body was properly vested.

  Rosalia Lombardo, who died on the 6th of December 1920 at age one, was among the last bodies interred in the Capuchin catacombs of Palermo, Sicily before local authorities ended the practice. Embalmed by Alfredo Salafia, she remains perfectly intact in a glass case and is known as the Sleeping Beauty. Medgar Evers, the murdered civil rights activist, was so effectively embalmed that a valid autopsy could be performed on his remains decades after his death, and that examination helped secure the conviction of his killer.

  Abraham Lincoln was embalmed after his assassination in 1865. When his son Robert ordered the coffin opened in 1901 before reburial in a concrete vault in Springfield, Illinois, Lincoln's features were still recognizable, 36 years after his death. Pedro II of Brazil, who died in exile in France in 1891, received six liters of zinc and aluminum hydrochloride injected into his common carotid artery on the 5th of December, the day of his death. He was sealed in three nested coffins, the innermost of lead lined with white satin. In 1912, a Brazilian educator visiting the Royal Pantheon of the House of Braganza in Lisbon found the emperor's body still in the uniform of a Marshal of the Imperial Brazilian Army, clutching a silver crucifix sent by Pope Leo XIII. The educator left a vivid account of the imperfect preservation: "His face resembles old wax. His beard, once so fine, silky, and white, has turned a dull yellow, like aged ivory." Pedro II and his wife Teresa Cristina were officially repatriated to Brazil aboard a Brazilian Navy ship in 1921 and now rest in the Cathedral of Saint Peter of Alcantara in Petrópolis, a city Pedro II himself founded.

• 8. Anatomy, Faith, and the Future

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  Medical embalming for anatomy education follows a different logic entirely. Here, presentation matters far less than long-term preservation. Anatomical fluids contain concentrated formaldehyde at 37-40%, a preparation known as formalin, along with glutaraldehyde and phenol, with no dyes or perfumes. These cadavers develop a uniform grey coloration from the formaldehyde mixing with blood, a result called formaldehyde grey or embalmer's grey.

  A notably different approach was developed gradually from the 1960s onward by anatomist Walter Thiel at the Graz Anatomy Institute in Austria. His method preserves the cadaver's natural color, texture, and plasticity. It uses 4-chloro-3-methylphenol and various salts for fixation, boric acid for disinfection, and ethylene glycol to maintain tissue flexibility. Cadavers prepared this way are used in surgical and anaesthesia training, preoperative test procedures, and CT image quality studies.

  Religious perspectives on embalming vary widely. Traditional Jewish law forbids it; burial is to be done as soon as possible, preferably within 24 hours. Islam does not practice embalming except in cases of necessity, such as international transport. Hindus generally cremate the body as soon as possible. Bahá'í members are not embalmed; the body is washed and placed in a cotton, linen, or silk shroud. Zoroastrians traditionally use a sky burial within a structure called a Tower of Silence, which is directly contrary to embalming's purpose. Some Neopagans consider embalming unnatural because it disrupts the body's return to the earth. Most Christian denominations leave the decision to the family, though some bodies within Eastern Orthodoxy hold an absolute ban except when legally required. The Latter-day Saints neither discourage nor prohibit it.

  Environmentalists have raised concerns about the chemicals involved, particularly formaldehyde's potential interactions with the environment after burial. In response, formaldehyde-free embalming mixtures have become available. The Strasbourg Agreement of the Council of Europe, agreed to by more than 20 European states, requires embalming only when the individual died from an infectious disease, a sign that international standards tend toward minimal intervention. The tension between the urge to preserve and the various reasons to let the body go remains unresolved, and it shapes every embalming decision made today.