The American Way of Death Revisited - Jessica Mitford [38]
I confronted some teachers in colleges of mortuary science with the opinion of your San Francisco pathologist that embalming in no way lessens the spread of communicable disease. Their first reaction was “who is he, what is his proof?” And, rightly so. Then they add that it is not contended embalming destroys all microbes.
What is contended? We are not told. An authority is cited that seems vaguely irrelevant. It is recommended that I read Public Health in Boston, 1630–1822; I am assured that the dean of the American Academy of Funeral Service “has documented proof,” but no further evidence is offered. This reminds me of the old trial lawyers’ maxim: “When the law is against you, argue the facts; when the facts are against you, argue the law; when the law and the facts are against you, give the opposing counsel hell.”
A health officer, in the single reference to a source outside the funeral industry, is quoted as advancing a startlingly novel argument for embalming. It is efficacious, he declares, not only from a public health standpoint but “from the standpoint of man’s ages-long concern with life after death,” a proposition that is hard to argue against.
The only specific information offered Mr. Raether by spokesmen for the National Funeral Directors Association (NFDA)—to support the contention that embalming has value as a sanitary measure—concerned “the procedures followed at the famous Mayo Clinic, where they have a standing rule that no autopsy shall be conducted on a body unless that body is embalmed—unless they need tissue immediately. This is a standing rule for the protection of doctors and pathologists who might be working with the body.”
Unversed though I am in the procedures of doctors and pathologists, this sounded very strange to me. I wrote to the clinic in question to ask if it was true. Their answer: “Unfortunately, it appears that Mr. Raether has been misinformed concerning the attitude of the Mayo Clinic toward the embalming of bodies. We have no rule which requires that bodies be embalmed before an autopsy is performed. It is true that frequently bodies are embalmed prior to the performance of an autopsy, but this is done more for the convenience of the funeral directors than because of any insistence on our part.”
Kenneth V. Iserson is a professor of surgery and director of the bioethics program at the Medical School of the University of Arizona. After twenty years in practice treating dying patients and counseling professionals and families about sudden death, he realized, when preparing an ethics paper on teaching with donated remains, that there were huge gaps in his knowledge about what happened to dead bodies. He was prompted to investigate, and the results of his exploration were published as Death to Dust: What Happens to Dead Bodies? (Galen Press, 1994).
Dr. Iserson’s massive, comprehensive volume is easily the best work on the subject that has appeared in recent years, and it is written with a fluency that makes it accessible to the lay reader as well as the professional.
He was initially stymied by what he felt was a cover-up by a funeral industry that systematically conceals its methods. He says now, in words which have a familiar ring to me, “At the time I was writing, I had to work with several Deep Throats.”
Like Dr. Carr, Dr. Iserson has no patience with the argument that embalming is necessary because of the health hazard posed by unembalmed bodies. He quotes with approval Dr. Carr’s discussion with me, adding that the Arizona Auditor General’s Office, in a review of funeral industry practices, concluded that “the public health risks associated with the disposal of human remains are minimal”; also, a Canadian health minister, “Embalming serves no useful purpose in preventing the transmission of communicable disease.”
The clincher for Dr. Iserson is the acknowledged failure of embalmers universally to apply measures for their own protection. If embalmers are not concerned about protecting themselves, he reasons, what message does