Colonel Elmer E. Ellsworth: The First Military Casualty of the American Civil War

From: civilwarundertaker.net

Colonel Ellsworth was the first military casualty of the American Civil War. On May 24, 1861, along with his New York City Volunteer Regiment (made up mostly of New York City Firemen) Colonel Ellsworth went to remove a large Confederate flag from the roof of the Marshall House Hotel in Alexandria, Virginia. It was there that he was shot in the chest with a shotgun blast and killed.

Upon the return of his body to the Washington Navy Yard, Dr. Thomas Holmes visited President Lincoln and offered to embalm the body free of charge. He was subsequently given permission to do so. It is reported that Mrs. Lincoln was so impressed with Colonel Ellsworth's appearance, that at the death of President and Mrs. Lincoln's son, Willie, she requested that the same embalmer prepare their son's body.

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Dr. William J. Bunnell's Embalming Shed Near the Battlefield at Fredericksburg

From: civilwarundertaker.net

The accompanying photo shows one of Dr. Bunnell's  (1823-1891) embalming sheds near Fredericksburg, Virginia, December 1862.  The embalmer would use any building or shed available.  In the absence of a permanent structure he would pitch a tent.  There were days when it was not uncommon for there to be more than 100 bodies waiting to be embalmed.

As the "embalming surgeon" or "undertaker" contracted to prepare the body of the dead soldier, he would set up an embalming tent near the battlefield or hospital.  There would be times when there might be tens upon tens of bodies waiting to be embalmed and prepared for shipment home. The cost would vary with each embalmer.  For many families the cost was a hardship.  However, having a Christian burial at home for their loved one was worth the sacrifices that had to be made.  Of course, when the body arrived home there would be additional costs for the wake and service.

It is well to remember that because of horrific battle conditions and general confusion, it was very difficult to located the remains of an officer and almost impossible to locate the remains of a common soldier.  But still, the hopes of the family persisted.  It became more and more common for the soldiers to pin cards to their sack coat or shirt, or to wear a metal disk around the neck, upon which he would write his name and hometown.  If his body would be found the undertaker would know where to send it.

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Embalming Exhibit Preserves Gory Part of Civil War History

By David Dishneau, August 2003

The table is a peeling wooden door laid flat across two upright barrels. The deceased is a bearded young man, his lips and eyelids blue, bare feet extending beyond a white sheet. And hand-pumping chemicals into the body is Dr. Richard Burr, a 19th century Army surgeon who found opportunity in the flourishing practice of embalming fallen Civil War soldiers.

The exhibit is the latest addition to the National Museum of Civil War Medicine in Frederick, Md., a permanent installation of photographs, artifacts and life-size mannequins documenting America's embrace of full-body preservation.

"It's just gruesome enough to get the point across of how serious this was, but we've down-played the goriness enough to not have people run away in revulsion," says George Wunderlich, the museum's executive director.

Embalming dates to ancient Egypt but it wasn't widely used in the United States until the Civil War, to preserve soldiers' remains for shipment home. Before then, chemical preservation of human tissue was used mainly for specimens, says Terry Reimer, the museum's research director. When someone died, undertakers tried to keep the body chilled to slow decay until burial. Refrigerated "holding coffins", with ice chambers on top and drainage systems below, could be rented for viewing.

Civil War battles killed huge numbers of men, many from places far from the battlefields. Some surgeons and pharmacists familiar with tissue preservation became embalmers, following the troops and offering, for fees of up to $100, to prepare bodies for the long journey home. It could take several days for the remains of those killed in Sharpsburg, Md., or Gettysburg, Pa., to arrive in New England or the Deep South. Reimer said railroads would only accept bodies that were odour-free, which meant they had to be either embalmed, disinfected, or sealed in vessels such as the Fisk burial case, and air-tight, cast iron shell.

James W. Lowry, author of Embalming Surgeons of the Civil War, says most of the 529,000 soldiers killed in the war were simply buried near where they died, often wrapped in a blanket. The 10,000 to 40,000 who were embalmed were largely officers. "After one of these large battles, the embalming surgeons, once they got to the battlefield, would go out and bring in the bodies of the officers," says Lowry, a Charleston, W.Va., funeral director. Because officers generally came from wealthier families, "they knew if they embalmed them, they'd get paid." The embalmers often prepared the bodies immediately, before contacting the families, he says.

Reimer says some pharmacists stored embalmed bodies by standing them up against a wall. One, in Washington, D.C., displayed a uniformed corpse in the window for several days, she says.
The museum exhibit recreates a photograph of Burr demonstrating the procedure. A black rubber tube runs from a canister of preservative perhaps arsenic or creosote because formaldehyde hadn't been discovered yet into an artery in the subject's right armpit. Reimer says Civil War embalmers didn't drain their subjects many had bled out on the battlefield anyway. They simply pumped the preservative into an artery and moved on.

The practice, though less thorough than today's techniques, was effective, Lowry says. Draining blood from corpses became more common towards the end of the war; President Abraham Lincoln's body was drained before embalming.

The 7-year-old museum is the only one in the country dedicated to the medical side of the Civil War, which also produced advancements in anaesthesia, nursing, ambulances and mobile hospitals. Some students in a group of eighth-graders on a recent tour avoided looking at the display, but Elaine English, one of their chaperones, couldn't forget it. "I'm sure I'll see it tonight in my dreams," she says.

From: acws.co.uk

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Dr. Thomas Holmes, "Father of Modern Embalming"

From: civilwarundertaker.net

Dr. Thomas Holmes (1817-1900)
Dr. Holmes, was born in New York in 1817. He attended public schools and New York University Medical College, though there are no records of him graduating. However, in the 1850's he did practice medicine and was a coroner's physician in New York. In the 1850's Dr. Holmes perfected what we know today as modern embalming techniques. He is generally acknowledged as the "Father of Modern Embalming". When the Civil War broke out he opened an embalming office in Washington, DC. Colonel Ellsworth became his first prominent client. Dr. Holmes was responsible for preparing about 4000 bodies to be sent home. During his lifetime he was also awarded many patents for inventions related to embalming. Following the War he returned to his home in Brooklyn, New York, but did very little embalming after that. Oddly enough, before his death in 1900 he requested that he not be embalmed.

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Abraham Lincoln and The Embalmer: Dr. Thomas Holmes

From: drvitelli.typepad.com

The assassination of Abraham Lincoln on April 15, 1865 shocked a nation still recovering from four years of bloody civil war.   Along with the hunt for his killers and the uncovering of the assassination plot against the President and several other members of his administration, there was also the logistic nightmare of his funeral and the need to transport the President's body by train from Washington D.C. to his final resting place in Springfield, Illinois.   Since the funeral train would retrace the route that Lincoln had traveled to Washington following his election,  the body would be viewed by millions of mourners along the way during the numerous planned stops.   All of which raised the question of how to keep the body preserved long enough to reach its destination.   Considering the fact that funeral embalming was a relatively new development at that time, some very special arrangements needed to be made.

Enter Thomas Holmes, the "father of American embalming"...

After graduating from Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1845, Dr. Holmes developed a keen interest in the proper preserving of cadavers for dissection.  He was also openly critical of the chemical preservatives that were commonly used and the possible health risks that they posed to medical students.   Considering that many of the popular preservatives used arsenic and mercury, he was likely right.   In searching for a better way to preserve bodies, he discovered that European anatomists had already begun experimenting with arterial embalming, i.e.,  opening up an artery in the cadaver, flushing out the blood with water and replacing it with a preservative (typically alcohol).    Through his research, Dr. Holmes developed a more practical embalming solution that he patented and sold commercially. 

Still, it was the outreak of the U.S. Civil War and the problem of preserving the corpses of thousands of soldiers to allow them to be sent home for burial that gave Dr. Holmes the chance to test out his improved preservation methods on a broad scale.    Although the corpses were typically buried at the battlefield sites where they were killed, families often demanded that the corpses be disinterred so they could receive "proper" burials.   Considering the lack of proper refrigeration or hermetically sealed coffins, the delivery brigades charged with shipping the bodies turned to Dr. Holmes and his embalming methods to keep the bodies from decaying long enough to be reburied by their families.   

After receiving a commission as a captain in the Army Medical Corps, Dr. Holmes was assigned to Washington, D.C. and managed to impress President Lincoln enough that the Quartermaster Corps was mobilized to use embalming on a wide scale to return the corpses of Northern soldiers to their homes (the Confederate army never adopted embalming for their soldiers).   Setting up battlefield embalming stations, Dr. Holmes trained numerous embalmers in his new technique and a new profession, the "embalming surgeon" quickly sprang up.    It is hard to say how many corpses Dr. Holmes and his assistants prepared for shipping, (he later claimed to have personally embalmed more than 4,000 bodies but this is probably an exaggeration).   The demand for embalming services became so great that some unscrupulous embalmers actually competed for corpses on the battlefield (the army offered an $80.00 fee for the embalmed body of an officer and $30.00 for a soldier).   By 1865,  the problem had become so bad that the War Department put out General Order 39 to ensure that only properly licensed embalmers would be allowed to offer services to the families of the war dead.  Once the war was over, Dr. Holmes` numerous trained assistants returned home and put their skills to good use. 

Following President Lincoln`s assassination, Mary Todd Lincoln personally requested that Dr. Holmes be placed in charge of her husband`s embalming.    She had been familiar with his work after seeing how effective he was in preparing the body of  Colonel Elmer Elsworth, the first casualty of the U.S. Civil War.  The Lincolns had been impressed enough to have Dr. Holmes embalm the body of their son, William Wallace Lincoln, when he died in 1862.    Embalming the President`s corpse for the long funeral train  was probably the best possible advertisement for the new arterial embalming technique since thousands of mourners were able to see  for themselves how effective it could be. 

Not that there were any actual "embalming surgeons" left for long.  Within just a few years after the end of the Civil War,  embalming was largely left up to professional undertakers.   There was not much of an  organized funerary trade at first (many new embalmers gained their skills from correspondence courses and conducted funerals out of their own homes).  Still,  the next few decades saw a tremendous rise in the funeral industry including the use of open-casket funerals and "wakes" (as opposed to burying the body as quickly as possible).   Dr. Holmes'  embalming fluid and his patented fluid pump were in high demand as more and more people began demanding that their loved ones be embalmed prior to burial.    There were still health risks involved since even the Holmes embalming fluid contained dangerous levels of arsenic (which continued to be used for embalming corpses until well into the 20th century when formaldehyde was adopted).    As for Dr. Thomas Holmes himself, his role as the "father of American embalming" didn't provide him with much success in life. 

Although Dr. Holmes tried to distance him from the embalming trade after the war, the money that he made from selling his embalming fluid was likely the only real business success he ever had.   According to Mary Roach and her excellent book Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers,  Dr. Holmes tried different ventures including opening a drugstore,  running at health spa, and launching a root-beer business although he eventually managed to exhaust all of his savings.     He also became, well, strange in his old age (possibly due to the effects of long-term arsenic exposure gained from his embalming experiments).  Not only did he never marry or have children, but he filled his Brooklyn home with some graphic examples of his embalming skill. 

Those few visitors with the nerve to enter his home often encountered preserved bodies in closets and heads sitting on tables in the living-room (he was also a fan of phrenology).     Perhaps not surprisingly, he spent a considerable amount of time in and out of asylums whiile continuing to research new and better ways of preserving corpses.   He was also determined to profit from the funeral industry any way that he could.   Just a few years before his death in 1899, Dr. Holmes took out ads in mortuary trade journals with his latest invention:  a canvas body bag that could also double as a sleeping bag.   Sadly, this last innovation never really caught on (pity there was no eBay back then) and the "father of American embalming", for reasons known only to him, specificaly requested that his body not be embalmed before burial. 

While not as well known as other scientific pioneers, Dr. Thomas Holmes helped launch the funeral industry and, in turn, helped change attitudes concerning death.  He may have also created one of the first industrial hazards of the modern era considering the popularity of his arsenic-based embalming fluid.    As embalming became increasingly affordable and popular, the demand for embalming fluid and its principal ingredient, arsenic, meant a steady rise in arsenic contamination of local water supplies as decaying coffins (whether made of wood or metal) allowed embalmed remains to leak into the groundwater.  

In many cases, the presence of an old cemetery often endangered the health of people living in the surrounding area.  Although arsenic was eventually phased out in favour of formaldehyde (which was already available in Dr. Holmes's time), the thousands of embalmed corpses still remaining in cemeteries across the country have been shown by researchers to carry dangerous amounts of arsenic.   Since arsenic exposure can enter the bloodstream in different ways, people working around old burial sites need to take special precautions to prevent health problems.

Which is probably not the lasting legacy that Dr. Thomas Holmes had in mind.

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Embalming Surgeons and Undertakers

From: civilwarundertaker.net

"Rest on Embalmed and Sainted dead

Dear as the blood ye gave

The Herbage of your grave."

(Meig's Gate on Arlington Road, Arlington National Cemetery)

During the early part of the Civil War it was the Embalming Surgeons that performed the embalming procedure. Many of the men were military surgeons. However, there were also a large number of civilian surgeons that took up embalming and became embalming surgeons. They realized the monetary benefits to the profession and saw this as a way to increase there fortunes. Most of the embalming surgeons were honest men. There were many reports however, of many unscrupulous embalming surgeons out to take advantage of soldier and family alike. Toward the latter part of the War there were reports of a few undertakers beginning to embalm both at home and on the field of battle.

Of the tens upon tens of embalming surgeons practicing during the War years, very few are heard of following the War. It is then that the undertaker begins to see the potential and the obvious extension of embalming into the undertaking profession.

The embalming surgeon was a Northern phenomenon. To date there seems to be no documentation that there were Southern embalming surgeons. When one looks at the circumstances surrounding the onset of this new trade, one can understand why it was not until after the War that embalming moved into the South. Dr. Thomas Holmes, the "Father of Modern Embalming", was from New York, his protégées were all Northerners, the chemicals were developed, patented and manufactured in the North. During the beginning of the War, Washington was the center of all that happened with the military. The embalmers flocked to Washington until they became such a nuisance that they were run out of the city. From then on, those with the drive to either make money or help the troops and their families, moved nearer the battlefields or field hospitals.

The South had neither the knowledge nor the resources to enter into this new embalming trade. This is not to say that there may not have been an occasional Confederate soldier or officer embalmed by a Northern embalmer and sent home, but this was by no means a common occurrence.

Public Acceptance of Embalming
Even though the public was familiar with embalming, [soldiers being sent home embalmed and President Lincoln and other notables having been embalmed], the general public did not take to this new invasion of the body. There were many bodies embalmed after the Civil War, but it was not until the beginning of the Twentieth Century that embalming became an accepted practice. It was at first performed in the home by the undertaker. By the early to mid 1920s the funeral home as we know it was beginning to emerge.

IMAGE: Dr. Richard Burr, an embalming surgeon who worked in Frederick, MD, shown embalming a soldier recovered from the battlefield.  You can see the embalming pump in his right hand, and the tubing attached to it above the chest of the soldier’s body.  Embalming tables were not usually available in the field, so here he is using a door placed over two large barrels.

Visit www.CivilWarRx.com to learn more about embalming in the Civil War.

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Embalming in the Civil War

By Lori Eggleston

Although the practice of embalming dates back to ancient Egypt, the procedure was not widely practiced in the United States until the Civil War.  Since so many soldiers died far from their homes and their families usually wanted them buried at home, there was a need to preserve their bodies for the journey.

 Another factor in making embalming known to the general public was the death of Colonel Elmer E. Ellsworth.  Colonel Ellsworth was a friend of President Lincoln, and was also the first officer who was a military casualty of the Civil War.  On May 24, 1861, he was shot while removing a Confederate flag from the roof of a hotel in Virginia.  Dr. Thomas Holmes, who is known as the father of modern embalming and who had recently opened an embalming office in Washington D.C., offered his services for free.  No doubt he saw an opportunity to acquaint the public with his craft!  Col. Ellsworth’s body was embalmed and displayed to the public at his funeral, and people were impressed with his “lifelike” look.  After the President’s assassination, Mrs. Lincoln even requested the same procedure for him.

Embalmers of the time used a variety of different solutions for embalming.  It was common to find various combinations of arsenic, creosote, mercury, turpentine, and alcohol in these solutions.  Though effective for embalming, these solutions could be hazardous to the embalmers.  They can also still be hazardous to the curators and collection managers who handle some of the embalming artifacts!

As the Civil War progressed, the demand for embalming services increased, and more people saw the opportunity to make some money by becoming embalmers.  Embalming fees varied and usually were based on the soldier’s rank, or the supposed ability of his family to pay.  Some embalmers would hang around the camps and promote their services – which was not great for morale!  Others would search the battlefields for the highest ranking dead officers, hoping to make money by contacting their family and offering their services. Some sources claim that our Dr. Burr was not the most honest embalmer.  He seems to be fairly well known for price gouging as well as for reselling the same grave markers for locally buried soldiers.  There are even some stories which claim he robbed dead and dying soldiers as he searched the battlefields.  He was not the only one, by any means.  It was enough of a problem that in March 1865 the War Department issued General Order Number 39, "Order Concerning Embalmers."  This order required, “…all who embalm or remove bodies of deceased officers or soldiers to obtain a special license...”   It also set the prices which embalmers could charge.  Unfortunately, this order came late enough in the war that it had very little effect.

FROM: The Frederick News Post

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