Caleb Wilde
(218 comments, 980 posts)
Posts by Caleb Wilde
Replacing Caskets and Vaults with Eco-Friendly Burial Pods
Via the Capsula Mundi website:
Capsula Mundi is a container with an old perfect shape, just like an egg, made with modern material -starch plastic- in which the dead body is put in a fetal position. Capsula Mundi is planted like a seed in the soil, and a tree is planted on top of it. The tree is chosen when the person is alive, relatives and friends look after it when death occurs. A cemetery will no longer be full of tombstones and will become a sacred forest.
Unfortunately, this isn’t a product that’s yet available to the public. But, if it were, would you use it?
Sarah Bernhardt was very, very different
Sarah Bernhardt makes Lady Gaga look like Taylor Swift.
Via Andy Boyd at the University of Houston:
Sarah Bernhardt was born in the early 1840s in Paris, France. Her father is unknown. Her mother was a courtesan for the well-to-do, and trained her daughter in the art of alluring men for a living. Bernhardt proved to be a melodramatic child, a trait she demonstrated throughout her life.
One of her mother’s lovers, a half brother of Napoleon III, arranged for Bernhardt to gain entry into the French national theater company. Bernhardt slowly gathered a following, but critical reviews were mixed. Victor Hugo loved her, both on stage and in the boudoir. George Bernard Shaw did not, writing that her acting was “childishly egotistical” and commenting, “she does not enter into the leading character: she substitutes herself for it.” Regardless of what the critics said, the public adored the lovely young woman.
Bernhardt displayed an off-stage quirkiness that only added to her mystique. She traveled with an entourage of wild animals, including a cheetah, a wolf, and a boa-constrictor. An alligator named Ali-Gaga died after being fed too much milk and champagne. Bernhardt liked to wear a stuffed, dead bat. Most famously, she traveled with a coffin where she claimed to sleep. A widely circulated photo of a peaceful Bernhardt lying in a coffin, eyes closed, draped with flowers, no doubt served to fuel public curiosity.
To read more click HERE
The Most Beautiful Embalming in the World?
Rosalia Lombardo’s one hundred year old body may be the most beautifully embalmed body in the world. Here’s some history and a video:
Via Wikipedia:
Rosalia Lombardo (December 13, 1918 in Palermo, Italy – December 6, 1920), was an Italian child who died of pneumonia. Rosalia’s father, Official Mario Lombardo, was sorely grieved upon her death, so he approached Alfredo Salafia, a noted embalmer, to preserve her. Her body was one of the last corpses to be admitted to the Capuchin catacombs of Palermo in Sicily.
Thanks to Salafia’s embalming techniques, the body was well preserved. X-rays of the body show that all the organs are remarkably intact.
Rosalia Lombardo’s body is kept in a small chapel at the end of the catacomb’s tour and is encased in a glass covered coffin, placed on a wooden pedestal. A 2009 National Geographic photograph of Rosalia Lombardo shows the mummy is beginning to show signs of decomposition, most notably discoloration.To address these issues the mummy was moved to a drier spot in the catacombs, and her original coffin was placed in a hermetically sealed glass enclosure with nitrogen gas to prevent decay.
The mummy is one of the best preserved bodies in the catacombs.
Technique
Recently, the mummification techniques used by Salafia were discovered in a handwritten memoir of Salafia’s. Salafia replaced the girl’s blood with a liquid made of formalin to kill bacteria, alcohol to dry the body, glycerin to keep her from overdrying, salicylic acid to kill fungi, and zinc salts to give her body rigidity. Accordingly, the formula’s composition is “one part glycerin, one part formalin saturated with both zinc sulfate and chloride, and one part of an alcohol solution saturated with salicylic acid.”
When the Public Viewing of a Mutilated Body is a Statement: The Funeral of Emmett Till
Perhaps the greatest value that the embalmer gives to society is the ability to restore disfigured bodies. There’s a limit to what we’re able to restore, but for many cases we can allow families to see their deceased loved one in a restored (or semi-restored) state.
Sometimes, though, the viewing of a mutilated body is a statement.
Via Wikipedia:
Emmett Louis Till (July 25, 1941 – August 28, 1955) was an African-American teenager who was murdered in Mississippi at the age of 14 after reportedly flirting with a white woman. Till was from Chicago, Illinois, visiting his relatives in Money, Mississippi, in the Mississippi Delta region, when he spoke to 21-year-old Carolyn Bryant, the married proprietor of a small grocery store there. Several nights later, Bryant’s husband Roy and his half-brother J. W. Milam went to Till’s great-uncle’s house. They took Till away to a barn, where they beat him and gouged out one of his eyes, before shooting him through the head and disposing of his body in the Tallahatchie River, weighting it with a 70-pound (32 kg) cotton gin fan tied around his neck with barbed wire. Three days later, Till’s body was discovered and retrieved from the river.
Till’s body was returned to Chicago. His mother, who had raised him mostly by herself, insisted on a public funeral service with an open casket to show the world the brutality of the killing. “The open-coffin funeral held by Mamie Till Bradley exposed the world to more than her son Emmett Till’s bloated, mutilated body. Her decision focused attention not only on American racism and the barbarism of lynching but also on the limitations and vulnerabilities of American democracy”
The murderers were later acquitted of their actions by an all white jury. A couple months after their acquittal, they confessed the crime and sold their story to Look Magazine for $4,000.
Concerning the public viewing (which reportedly drew more than 100,000 viewers), Emmett’s mother stated, “let the world see what has happened, because there is no way I could describe this. And I needed somebody to help me tell what it was like.”
