|
|
|
By DAVID DISHNEAU, Associated Press Writer
FREDERICK, Md. - The table is a peeling wooden door, laid flat across two upright barrels. The deceased is a bearded young man, his lips and eyelids blue, bare feet extending beyond a white sheet.
|
And hand-pumping chemicals into the body is Dr. Richard Burr, a 19th century Army surgeon who found opportunity in the flourishing practice of embalming fallen Civil War soldiers.
The exhibit is
the latest addition to the National Museum of Civil War Medicine, a
permanent installation of photographs, artifacts and life-size
mannequins documenting America's embrace of full-body preservation.
"It's just
gruesome enough to get the point across of how serious this was, but
we've downplayed the goriness enough to not have people run away in
revulsion," said George Wunderlich, the museum's executive
director.
Embalming dates
to ancient Egypt but it wasn't widely used in the United States until
the Civil War, to preserve soldiers' remains for shipment home.
Before then,
chemical preservation of human tissue was used mainly for specimens,
said Terry Reimer, the museum's research director. When someone died,
undertakers tried to keep the body chilled to slow decay until burial.
Refrigerated "holding coffins, with ice chambers on top and
drainage systems below, could be rented for viewings.
Civil War
battles killed huge numbers of men, many from places far from the
battlefields. Some surgeons and pharmacists familiar with tissue
preservation became embalmers, following the troops and offering, for
fees of up to $100, to prepare bodies for the long journey home.
It could take
several days for the remains of those killed in Sharpsburg, Md., or
Gettysburg, Pa., to arrive in New England or the Deep South. Reimer
said railroads would only accept bodies that were odor-free, which
meant they had to be either embalmed, disinfected or sealed in vessels
such as the Fisk burial case, an airtight, cast-iron shell.
James W. Lowry,
author of the book, "Embalming Surgeons of the Civil War,"
said most of the 529,000 soldiers killed in the war were simply buried
near where they died, often wrapped in a blanket. The 10,000 to 40,000
who were embalmed were largely officers, he said.
"After one
of these large battles, the embalming surgeons, once they got to the
battlefield, would go out and bring the bodies of the officers
in," said Lowry, a Charleston, W.Va., funeral director. Since
officers generally came from wealthier families, "they knew if
they embalmed them, they'd get paid."
The embalmers
often prepared the bodies immediately, before contacting the families,
he said. Reimer said some pharmacists stored embalmed bodies by
standing them up against a wall. One, in Washington, D.C., displayed a
uniformed corpse in a window for several days, she said.
Burr, a
Philadelphia physician, served briefly with the 72nd Pennsylvania
Infantry before becoming an embalmer. According to Reimer and Lowry,
he was notorious for price-gouging. Burr also had a sideline of
selling and reselling the same grave marker for soldiers buried
locally, Lowry said.
The museum
exhibit in downtown Frederick recreates a photograph of Burr
demonstrating the procedure. A black rubber tube runs from a canister
of preservative — perhaps arsenic or creosote, since formaldehyde
hadn't been discovered yet — into an artery in the subject's right
armpit.
Reimer said
Civil War embalmers didn't drain their subjects — many had bled out
on the battlefield anyway. They simply pumped the preservative into an
artery and moved on.
The practice,
while less thorough than today's techniques, was effective, Lowry
said. Draining blood from corpses became more common by the end of the
war; President Abraham Lincoln's body was drained before embalming,
Lowry said.
One embalming
surgeon, Dr. Thomas Holmes, claimed to have embalmed 4,028 bodies
during the four-year war, Lowry said.
On the wall
hangs one of Burr's advertisements, a handbill printed in Frederick in
October 1862, when the city was filled with dying soldiers wounded in
the nearby battles of Antietam and South Mountain.
"Embalming
the Dead," reads the poster, which is reproduced on T-shirts and
mugs available in the gift shop. The copy invites the curious to watch
the procedure, which, in the photograph, is being done outside a tent.
The
seven-year-old museum is the only one in the country dedicated to the
medical side of the Civil War, which also produced advancements in
anesthesia, nursing, ambulances and mobile hospitals.
The embalming
display is around the corner from an apothecary wagon and is the last
thing one sees before exiting the exhibits.
Some students in
a group of eighth graders on a recent tour avoided looking at the
display, but Elaine English, one of their chaperones, couldn't forget
it.
"I'm sure
I'll see it tonight in my dreams," she said.
