#//bc why would you leave me to rot for like a 500 years and never even bother to wake me up

[lumine-official]

Aether where the hell are you its been 3 years?? 3 years???? Brother if you think you can leave me for *3 YEARS* and appear only once Dain arrives then nahh 💀

You better come back because your emo Abyss ahh has better things to do

[dead-dialogs]

Everything’s Better(?) with Arsenic

Disclaimer: I have never dug up a dead person. That is, quite frankly, more paperwork than I have the attention span for (which is saying something, because for two years my whole job was paperwork). But fortunately for this blog post, there are a great many contemporary archaeologists who have dug up lots of dead people, including a bunch I know pretty well, and almost always they’re more than happy tell you about it. And publish about it. So thanks to everyone I used to work with, the Society for Historical Archaeology, and the multitude of private firms who put their dead shit/toxic shit protocols online in PDF format. 

The 19th century got really, really weird about death. 

To be fair, the 19th century also got really weird about a lot of things, like the color white, and putting pants on animals, and moral justifications for corporate imperialism, but we’re talking about death right now. There’s been a lot of work done about why things got so crazy, which might be a thing I talk about later. Right now, though, let’s talk embalming. 

People have been preserving other people’s dead bodies since way before the 19th century - don’t @ me, egyptology kids, I had that weird gold book with the scarab on the cover too. Even back to the Renaissance, anatomists were embalming bodies for dissection (listen, drawing the intestines takes a really long time, and it’s July and refrigeration won’t be invented for another 500 years, give or take, so we gotta do something or it’s going to get noxious in here real damn fast.) 

In the US, widespread embalming doesn’t really happen until the Civil War, for a couple reasons. In general, most people died within relatively easy riding distance of where the rest of their family was. There was this whole Victorian concept of a good death - not something we think about, in general, death is death and we normally don’t get to pick, but in the 19th century, there was a weird social stigma attached to everything you did, up to and including the way you died, because the Victorians were fucking nuts. The really only socially acceptable way to go was dying at home, in your own bedroom, ready to be prepared and brought into the parlor for the funeral. (Someone remind me to talk about coffin doors and the evolution of the living room in another post, it’s super interesting.) Dying anywhere that wasn’t home was this huge source of gossip, because if it was an illness, why weren’t you where your family was caring for you (because hospitals are deathtraps and also full of Poor People)? If it wasn’t an illness, why were you out doing something that could get you killed? Lots of judgement flying around in the Victorian era. 

The Civil War changed this in a really big, really immediate way. In addition to the whole dying away from home thing, in a way that really couldn’t be controlled since, you know, soldiers die, there’s also this lack of closure because of the chaotic nature of battle. A lot of families never really knew what happened to their male family members, because there wasn’t a system in place for notifying families of the deceased, and this is well before the era of dog tags or other forms of identification. In a lot of cases, missing in action just meant we don’t know which mass grave your son/brother/husband is in. Whoops. 

The US Army did have a system in place when they were able to identify you on the battlefield, or if you died in an army hospital, where they would embalm your remains and then ship you home on the closest railroad. After the war, this became just a cultural facet of death - you were embalmed, left out in the living room for a few days while people paid their respects, and then buried. This also dovetailed with some weird superstitious facets of the Christian traditions surrounding death (namely that Jesus would actually literally make you rise from the grave upon his return, but only if there was a body to raise, ie. cremation is definitely out). 

Since this is an era when literally no one knew what they were doing re: biology or chemistry, early chemical embalming was a lot of things getting thrown at the wall to see what would keep it from rotting. People discovered that arsenic tended to work well, so this was the primary chemical used from 1850 all the way up until 1910, when it was banned by the US because it kept killing embalmers. Go figure. Between 1853 and 1876, six different patents were filed for embalming fluid containing arsenic, ranging in concentration from four ounces to a Most Definitely Lethal twelve pounds per body. (For context, the minimum lethal dose for an average adult human is about 20mg, or eight ten thousandths of an ounce. Yikes.) 

Mercury was also used a lot, because we used mercury for goddamn everything, as well as formaldehyde. (To my knowledge, embalmers in the US still use formaldehyde today, although the EU has been trying to scale back its use because it definitely causes cancer.) In addition to all of this, some more wealthy individuals were buried in metal or lead-lined air tight caskets, which I guess were probably used primarily in shipping bodies?? I don’t know, I actually know more about dead bodies than their containers. If someone knows, come chat, we’ll be good friends. 

This is all well and good, except things like arsenic and mercury don’t actually, like, break down over time. So once the coffin is gone bc wood does break down over time, those chemicals start to leach down into the water table and get absorbed into local plant life, which is definitely not a thing you want to have happen at all. To further complicate matters, there’s very little record keeping about this from the period, so it’s functionally impossible to know which bodies were embalmed or what chemicals/how much of them were used. Which makes it really fun to be an archaeologist moving a 19th century cemetery. 

Fortunately, there’s a couple really easy ways to know if a body you’ve just excavated was embalmed with arsenic or mercury. If you open the casket and the bones are blue to blue-green and covered in tiny crystal structures, close that shit and leave immediately, that thing’s either a biohazard or an alien, and you want to be fucking with neither of those things. (Note: if there are only little spots of blue-green in places, that’s fine, because you know how copper turns your skin green? It does that to bone, too.) If you smell garlic (and no one’s eating lunch downwind), that’s also a big clue that you’re dealing with arsenic. And if you know the burial is for sure 19th century, and you crack that sucker open and there’s still little bits of flesh, that’s a dead giveaway that there’s some hardcore preservatives at work. 

If you’re really unlucky, cracking open a metal or lead-lined casket might release all sorts of pathogens you’re not prepared to deal with, in some sort of time traveler's worst nightmare. There’s not a whole lot in the way of documentation for this, since the people who were typically being buried in these caskets were more affluent and archaeologists (and developers who want cemeteries moved for space to put up a Walmart) tend to leave them be. As in all cases dealing with the Victorian era, just exercise extreme amounts of caution, because those fuckers were playing with fire and just about everything else besides, and shit is very likely to get real fucking weird. 

If you found this informative, entertaining, or weird enough that you want to see more, drop me a line at dead-dialogs.tumblr.com or at macy.franken@gmail.com with your history questions, and consider kicking a few bucks into my KoFi at ko-fi.com/deaddialogs.