[Aktungbby]

Originally Posted by Mr Quatro

I wonder how many women gave up on their husband coming home thinking that their husband was dead and never coming home, going on and marring another man.

Hey! That would make a great movie ...

Oh, I left out that he comes home ...

Problem solved BBY where do you think the modern embalming practice got it's start?

In the accompanying photo Dr. Richard Burr, an embalming surgeon, is performing the embalming process on a soldier recovered from the battlefield. During the early years of the American Civil War, a new profession began to emerge. Some short time before the War was declared in 1861, Dr. Thomas Holmes, had developed a process by which a liquid could be injected into the body to preserve it for an extended period of time. The veins would be pumped full of this liquid to arrest and prevent decay thus making it possible to ship the body home. As officers and soldiers were killed in battle, more and more families wanted their loved one returned home for a funeral service and burial. With the new embalming process this became possible, expensive though it was. As families were able to raise the money, or soldiers had items of value to prepay for their own embalmment and shipment home, the undertaker would search the battlefields and hospitals hoping to find the body for whom they had contracted. They had never had so much work as was represented by the bureaucracy necessary to rebury the dead, with more than 300,000 Union soldiers ( from a total of approx. 600,000 war dead-mostly from disease??!!) relocated and buried in national cemeteries. That was an enormous logistical undertaking. And the pension system that was set up to take care of the relatives required a level of engagement in the lives of citizens and bureaucracy that didn't exist. Before, the government was very small.

Required reading: Naturally, proper funeral Victorian etiquette, fashion, and finance clashed given the astronomical death rate:

Etiquette books recommended that mothers mourn a child for one year, a child mourn a parent for one year, and siblings mourn for six months. Widowers mourned for only three months by wearing armbands, badges, or rosettes of black fabric. Widows, however, were expected to respect a minimum two and a half years in mourning. In the period immediately following the death of her husband, a wife embarked on heavy-mourning, in which she was compelled to wear only black clothing and to keep her face concealed with a black, crepe veil when she left her home. This was followed by full-mourning, during which she continued to don black garments and a veil, but lighter shades of lace and cuffs were allowed to adorn her outfit. The final stage, half-mourning, permitted the widow to wear solid-colored fabrics of lavender, gray, and some purples. With as many as one out of every four Confederate soldiers dying, women across the region were thrown into a perpetual state of mourning and often forced to abandon their rituals of dress and self-imposed seclusion.

Bottom line: Chemicals or couture the industry of death in the Civil War was about lookin' good & proper! http://historiccamdencounty.com/ccnews43.shtml