Embalming

Thiel embalming, anyone?

9 January 2013
Charles
15 Comments
Categories: Embalming

Professor Walther Thiel, an Austrian, developed an embalming process for medical cadavers. His process requires much less formaldehyde than conventional embalming fluids and, also, produces a much more ‘lifelike’ body with none of the hardness and stiffness associated with conventional embalming. Medical people are very keen on it — those who know about it. It’s only been around since 1992 and, because the technique is described in German, it hasn’t made itself particularly well-known. 

Soft embalming is a technique which relies on a mixture of salt compounds and very low amounts of volatile formaldehyde and formalin to effect fixation of tissue with a number of unique properties. Cadavers preserved with the Thiel Method have no detectable odor, a lifelike flexibility of body parts, excellent color preservation of muscle, viscera, and vasculature, and superior antimicrobial preservation properties. [Source]

They’re using it at the University of Dundee, the first place in the UK to opt for it. They’re doing so in anticipation of EU laws restricting the use of formalin, which is reckoned a carcinogen. They are delighted by the results. 

We wonder how many embalmers are aware of Thiel embalming. In terms of presentation alone, it would seem to do a much better job than the conventional method. 

Do have a look at the video on the Univ Dundee site, which shows a Thiel-embalmed cadaver, and see for yourself how much better it is. 

If it’s safer, too, there would seem to be a strong argument for it.

But would it work as well if the embalming mixture is used in the far lower concentrations required by the funeral industry. 

What do we know? If you know anything, do tell us. 

(Apologies to born-again anti-embalmers.)

Dying to achieve a lifelike appearance

27 November 2012
Charles
1 Comment
Categories: Embalming

A lawsuit by a New Jersey mortician stricken with leukemia is casting a spotlight on embalming, a standard practice in the funeral industry.

William Moore, 38 claims his illness was caused by exposure to formaldehyde, an ingredient in embalming fluid. He is suing his workplace and several manufacturers of embalming chemicals.

Moore was diagnosed with acute promyelocytic leukemia in 2010. Federal toxicologists in 2011 listed formaldehyde as a carcinogen and said mortuary workers were among those at risk of developing various cancers.

More

Grievers hoodwinked, run amok and bamboozled by their undertakers

10 July 2012
Charles
No comments
Categories: Embalming, funeral directors, funeral reformers

In the Bahamas some people are worried about their unregulated funeral industry, just as some British people are worried about their own unregulated funeral industry:

“Have the Bahamian people been hoodwinked, run amok, bamboozled, by persons purporting to be funeral service practitioners who are (actually) charlatans? Charlatans are impostors. Have we been hoodwinked, run amok, bamboozled by impostors in the funeral service industry?”

Grieving relatives put a sacred trust in the professional services they use when a loved one dies. Industry workers have told us that in their view all too often the public’s trust is abused.

One funeral director has been compiling a list of unqualified embalmers. 

The list claims there is an uncertified worker who engages in “unethical practices,” who is hired by a number of different establishments. Speaking about the same individual, and the person’s team, another source said: “They are nasty, don’t use proper hygiene, their equipment is not up to standard, their equipment is not properly sanitised and disinfected and they do work for others.”

The list claims there is another uncertified individual, who years ago was implicated in a police investigation concerning a corpse, who is still employed in the industry.

Another funeral director says:

“The ethics in funeral services has nothing to do with what the family sees. While they are not in the embalming room with you, the standard should be straight across the board. What they don’t know, they must be assured that Mr XYZ did it the proper way.”

Very true. 

Read the whole article here. 

The vital importance of being embalmed

2 July 2012
Charles
3 Comments
Categories: Embalming

“Contrary to popular belief, embalming a body is not required by law.

However, every funeral home requires it for an open casket service. Otherwise, there will be odors and the body may look grotesque for viewing, which affects a funeral home’s reputation.“

Source

Death kills?

31 May 2012
Charles
9 Comments
Categories: Embalming, funeral trends, green funeral, Hearses

Posted by Richard Rawlinson

Back in the day, it was a given of the natural order that the decomposition of our remains made us part of the food chain. In the last few decades, the negative environmental impact of burial and cremation has become an ethical issue. Although there’s increasing scepticism towards scientific claims about man-made global warming, one can still want to reduce air, soil and water pollution, with its adverse affects on our health and that of wildlife. 

Embalming chemicals; hardwood coffins; concrete vaults; quarried headstones; marble mausoleums; processional motorcades; non-organic flowers and refreshments: all on the bad list. 

Cardboard coffins and biodegradable urns; planting a tree to mark a resting place; new crematoria chimneys that reduce emissions; removal of mercury-amalgam fillings before cremation; car-sharing and locally-sourced refreshments: all on the good list. 

While dictating the menu of the buffet and the material of headstones might seem too finger-wagging, there’s a case for reducing toxins by replacing embalming formaldehyde with glutaraldehyde, which is less poisonous, and designing ‘clean’ smokestacks. 

That’s the beauty of technological evolution. Sophisticated Man’s primal survival instinct remains intact, He devises solutions to problems that arise. People argue over the best course of action, or the urgency of action, but the doomsayers are invariably silenced. 

Nuclear fuel and GM food polarise opinion when proposed as the sustainable answer to the world’s needs. Some see wind farms as an answer while others see them as useless energy generators that guzzle fossil fuel in their construction, slice up birds and damage tourism as eco-eyesores. 

In his new book, Watermelons (so-titled because they’re green on the outside and red on the inside), James Delingpole discusses the Climategate scandal in which tax payer-funded scientists manipulated research in the most unscientific ways to make man-made warming claims stand up. Their lies, cover-ups, distortions and exaggerations, claims Delingpole, have caused mass hysteria resulting in liberties curtailed and trillions of pounds squandered. 

What’s your take on the green movement’s influence on the funeral industry? Necessary initiatives welcomed by today’s consumers? Or overdone and greeted with apathy or scepticism?    

Habeas corpse

17 May 2012
Charles
6 Comments
Categories: Art and death, Dead people's rights, Embalming, funeral directors, Legal rights

An email flies in from a consumer advocacy org in the US. It’s about a British funeral consumer, let’s call him Jim, who has asked them for help. Jim has been told by his funeral director that there will be no funeral until he pays most of the bill upfront. Jim can manage much of the bill now, and can pay the balance very soon, but his funeral director won’t budge and the funeral is just days away. So Jim appoints another, more reasonable, funeral director, who rings up FD1 and says he’s coming to collect the body. FD1 refuses to release it.

What, the consumer advocacy org wanted to know, is Jim’s legal position?

I responded with the standard spiel. The executor/administrator is the legal ‘possessor’ and ‘controller’ of the body and it is an offence for anyone except the coroner to withhold the body from that person. Further, there being no property in a corpse, it is illegal to arrest one for debt. What’s more, it is almost certainly lawful to exercise reasonable force to gain (or regain) lawful possession of the corpse.

This applies, of course, whether or not the consumer has entered into a contract with the funeral home. A dead person cannot be used as a bargaining chip, and the executor can take their dead person home whenever, within reason, and as often as they want. I’m almost certain that’s right. 

And then my mind wandered sideways. For a long time I have wondered what it is legal and what it is illegal to do to a dead body. What constitutes what Americans classify ‘abuse of a corpse’?

And I wondered also about something else that’s been bugging me for a while: what status does routine embalming confer upon a body?

Having more pressing, urgent and duller things to do, I went a-googling. This time, I put in my thumb and pulled out a plum. Actually, two plums.

Plum One

The law case that altered the legal maxim that ‘the only lawful possessor of a corpse is the earth’ was the Anthony-Noel Kelly case. He is an artist. In 1998 he exhibited casts of body parts which had been smuggled out to him by lab technician Niel Lyndsay from the Royal College of Surgeons. Both were arrested and charged with stealing human body parts.  At the trial, the defence submitted at the close of the prosecution case that (i) parts of bodies were not in law capable of being property and therefore could not be stolen, and (ii) that the specimens were not in the lawful possession of the college at the time they were taken because they had been retained beyond the period of two years before burial stipulated in the Anatomy Act 1832, and so did not belong to it. The trial judge rejected those submissions, ruling that there was an exception to the traditional common law rule that there was no property in a corpse, namely that once a human body or body part had undergone a process of skill by a person authorised to perform it, with the object of preserving it for the purpose of medical or scientific examination, or for the benefit of medical science, it became something quite different from an interred corpse and it thereby acquired a usefulness or value and it was capable of becoming property in the usual way, and could be stolen. The same applies to body parts “if they have acquired different attributes by virtue of the application of skill of dissection and preservation techniques for exhibition and teaching purposes“.

There we have it. “Preservation techniques for exhibition … purposes.” Does this apply to bodies embalmed for viewing? After all, they have undergone a process of skill.  If Jim’s detained dead person has been embalmed, can his dead person now be classed as property?

Plum Two

The second discovery comes from a case before the European Court of Human Rights in 2007. Briefly, two men were killed in a firefight with Turkish security forces. When things had died down, members of the security forces cut the ears off the corpses.  The applicants complained of violations under Article 3 of the Convention on Human Rights, which prohibits torture, and “inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment”. The court’s judgement was that it appeared that the deceased’s ears had been cut off after they had died. Article 3 had never been applied in the context of respect for a dead body. Human quality was extinguished on death and, therefore, the prohibition on ill-treatment was no longer applicable to corpses; notwithstanding the cruelty of the acts concerned in the instant case. It followed that there had been no violation of art 3 on that account.

I don’t want to speculate on the implications of that.

Information source here.

Top tips for funeral shoppers

8 March 2012
Charles
3 Comments
Categories: coffins, Embalming, funeral cost, funeral directors, home funerals

Josh Slocum, Executive Director of the Funeral Consumers Alliance in the USA, is a major hero to all who toil at the GFG-Batesville Tower. Here he is talking on the telly about funeral pricing and home funerals.

It’s interesting to note the similarities with the British funeral industry, in particular consumers’ disapproval of the marking up of coffins. We unquestioningly accept mark-ups in all other commercial transactions, so why do we find the marking up of coffins so objectionable? Does it say something about our unease with a for-profit business model of funeral directing? If so, what can we do about it?

Josh talks about the Federal Trade Commission’s Funeral Rule, the sort of document we badly need in the UK. It’s very well written. What a pity the Office of Fair Trading has never written a version for British funeral consumers — or funeral shoppers, as Josh terms them. 

Josh talks, too, about the emotional and spiritual value of a home funeral as ‘personal, family event’, an alternative to turning your loved one over to strangers. In the US, the home funeral movement is growing. In Britain it has most regrettably stalled. 

Find the Federal Trade Commission Funeral Rule here. Hat tip to the Funeral Consumers Alliance to alerting us to this interview. 

Embalmer of the day

16 February 2012
Charles
1 Comment
Categories: Embalming

“I had to rebuild it in nine hours. I used everything: duct tape, masking tape, tissue builder, wound filler … I put, like, coat hangers and caulk in there and put him into a little baby outfit … He looked awesome.”

US embalmer Troy Schoeller on reconstructing the body of a baby. More on this story here.

Your caring undertaker knows best

16 February 2012
Charles
6 Comments
Categories: Embalming

From the current price list of a ‘family owned’ UK funeral director: 

“As the natural processes of decomposition begins immediately after death, any clients wishing to visit their deceased relative or friend in the Private Chapel of Rest must agree to the necessary preservation treatment being provided”.

Discuss