A wake or a shemira. An abhisegam. A coin placed on the eyes or in the mouth. Every culture on earth has some form of pre-funeral ritual. The major source of difference in these rituals is the reasoning behind the traditions, which are intimately linked to both religious beliefs and the events occurring around the time of that person’s death. These rituals, like the three just listed, serve to fill specific functions: to pray for the dead and guard the body from desecration; to cleanse and purify the deceased before cremation; and, to pay for passage to the underworld or afterlife. Some of these pre-funeral rituals are more complex and lengthy than others. Quite possibly the most complex and time-consuming rituals are those intended to preserve the body indefinitely.

Body preservation rituals can generally be broken into two categories: mummification and embalming. While mummification can be a natural byproduct of the burial environment, the most famous mummies are the result of a detailed process invented in Ancient Egypt. In America, we’re fascinated by Egyptian mummification, even though it’s a process not frequently chosen anymore by anyone, either here or in Egypt. That’s not to say that in the land of the free you can’t be mummified, because you can be, but if the preservation of a body is being performed here in the States, it’s almost always done by embalming. Prior to the 19th century, embalming was a rarity, and while modern Americans have some vague sense of what embalming includes, extraordinarily few recognize why or how embalming became such a widespread, cultural norm for pre-funeral preparations.

Stereoscope card of Lincoln's Philadelphia funeral procession via Wikimedia Commons — Stereoscope card of Lincoln's Philadelphia funeral procession *via Wikimedia Commons*

Blame, or credit, for the rise of modern embalming practices can be traced to one Thomas Holmes, who invented the formula that earned him a Captain’s commission in the Army Medical Corps in 1861, where he served as an official ‘embalmer-surgeon’. The American Civil War was bringing thousands of soldiers together from across America, and so most were dying far from home. At the time, though trains made it possible to ship a body across the continent, there was no method of preservation effective enough to get their bodies back for a family burial without significant decomposition. The last thing any grief-stricken family wanted to deal with was the already moldering, potentially unrecognizable, corpse of a loved one. Still, embalming may have become less of a norm and more of an occasional necessity had this technique not received a boost from none other than Abraham Lincoln, whose own embalmed corpse went on a 12-day memorial tour and public viewing from Washington D.C. before being interred back in Illinois.

Arguably, this series of events is the seed of America’s embalming craze. This trend would eventually grow into its own death industry, ending with what has become the complete “traditional” American funeral. A tradition that starts with the ritual of arterial embalming.