Time: 7 pm EDT
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In October 1902, Dr. Carl Lewis Barnes and his brother Thornton H. Barnes, both instructors at the Chicago College of Embalming, created a large exhibition of embalmed corpses and body parts for the National Funeral Directors Association in Milwaukee, WI. The Barnes brothers’ exhibit featured human specimens preserved with Bisga Embalming Fluid—a product invented and produced by Dr. Barnes for consumer use by other embalmers. The centerpiece of the exhibit was the Bisga Man, an embalmed male corpse sitting upright in a chair with one leg crossed over the other, wearing a fashionable suit.
In early twentieth-century America, the Bisga Man represented the perfect nexus of mid to late nineteenth-century preservation technologies that were to radically redefine the organic existence of the human corpse. Such preservation technologies represent a series of overlapping choices, embalming chemicals, apparatus, and funeral practices all intent on keeping the dead body looking ‘‘properly’’ human. Yet these external forces acting on the human corpse do much more than alter the chemical physiology of the dead body to suspend decomposition: through these forces, the concept of human death itself is simultaneously being altered.
Troyer’s talk analyses and critiques how the modern human corpse became an invented and manufactured consumer product through the industrialization of the dead body in mid nineteenth century America. More specifically, this talk illustrates how the modern human corpse is an invention of specific mid nineteenth century embalming and photographic technologies that seemingly stopped the visible effects of death as they were seen by the general public.
Dr John Troyer is the Director of the Centre for Death and Society at the University of Bath. He is a co-founder of the Death Reference Desk website, the Future Cemetery Project and a frequent commentator for the BBC. His most recent book Technologies of the Human Corpse was published by The MIT Press in Sprin 2020. He grew up in the American funeral industry.
Image: “I want to say a few words to the American funeral directors and embalmers: six months ago I made a few gallons of Bisga Embalming Fluid . . . I was finally able to produce a chemical which would not only remove the discolorations, if present, but would combine with the dark discolored blood and restore it to its natural color, thus removing every vestige of discolorations and thus give the body a perfect life-like appearance.”
- Carl Lewis Barnes, 1902, Bisga Embalming Fluid advertisement