Embalming
—Evelyn Waugh
Embalming is the art and science of preserving human remains by treating them (in its modern form with chemicals) to forestall decomposition. This is usually done to make the deceased suitable for viewing as part of the funeral ceremony or keep them preserved for medical purposes in an anatomical laboratory. The three goals of embalming are sanitization, presentation, and preservation, with restoration being an important additional factor in some instances. Performed successfully, embalming can help preserve the body for many years. Embalming has a very long and cross-cultural history, with many cultures giving the embalming processes religious meaning.
Quotes
[edit]- Of course they embalm’d you! Yet not so sweet
Were aloes and nard, as the youthful glow
Which Amenti stole when the small dark feet
Wearied of treading our world below.- Sir Edwin Arnold, "To a Pair of Egyptian Slippers"
- Potiphar's Wife and Other Poems (1895)
- They told me, Francis Hinsley, they told me you were hung
With red protruding eye-balls and black protruding tongue.
I wept as I remembered how often you and I
Had laughed about Los Angeles and now ’tis here you’ll lie;
Here pickled in formaldehyde and painted like a whore,
Shrimp-pink incorruptible, not lost nor gone before.- Evelyn Waugh, The Loved One: An Anglo-American Tragedy (1948)
- Parodying William Johnson Cory's translation of Anthologia Palatina, vii, 80
