Mr. Pearce, an undertaker in Ardmore, Ohio, believed his work deserved to be seen.
After all, shoemakers displayed their shoes, tailors hung their finest garments in the window, and other tradesmen showed off their skill to passing customers. Why, he seemed to reason, should an embalmer’s best work be hidden away underground almost as soon as it was finished?
So Pearce kept a sample.
For three years, a preserved corpse reportedly remained on display in the warm workroom of his funeral establishment, offered as proof of what modern embalming could do. The body had not decayed, carried no odor, and, according to the account, had become almost leather-like under the effects of formaldehyde.
Sample Corpse
An Ohio undertaker named Pearce doesn’t allow sentiment to interfere with business. He can’t see why the shoemaker adjoining his establishment should advertise his skill by displaying his samples, or the tailor across the street hang his latest sartorial confection in his front window, while the embalmer’s good work has to find a lodgment beneath six feet of earth almost as soon as it has been accomplished.
Mark Twain, when he was shown the mummy of a Pharaoh who lived in the time of Moses, shrugged his shoulders with contemptuous indifference and remarked to the curator of the museum:
“Haven’t you got a corpse that is a little fresher?”
All Mark has to do is to visit the funeral direction establishment of Mr. Pearce at Ardmore. There he will probably find something more to his fastidious fancy in the shape of a sample of embalming, kept on view by Mr. Pearce for inspection by his customers. The “subject” has now done service for a period of three years, and the proprietor confidently expects that it will last as long as he remains in business.
The body in question has been in the very warmest workroom of his establishment all this while, and the leather-like flesh of the corpse is totally free from odor or putrefaction.
Some say the hair on a body will grow after death. This probably originated in the mind of a dramatist or novelist, who wanted to sensationalize his readers to sell his books, for there lies Mr. Pearce’s dead man, with his very last hair cut the same as it was two or three years ago.
Then some say that the hair will fall out, but you couldn’t pull the hair out of that body with tweezers. Each hair seems to be particularly riveted into the hardening leather and bone. Even the fuzzy, lighter hairs of all other parts of the body remain the same as they were at death.
Formaldehyde, a products of wood alcohol, and a comparatively recent product, is the fluid with which the body was embalmed, and Mr. Pearce says that there is now a fluid, with other elements added, that is far better than the 140 ounces, or a little over one gallon — $3 worth — of the formaldehyde used for the desiccation of the body in question.
Source: The Copper Country Evening News. Calumet, Mich. November 22, 1897.
