#tombsday

Holmes was chosen as he had already begun experimenting with the embalming process in years prior to the war (at least as early as 1857). His work was much influenced by a French predecessor in the field, Jean-Nicolas Gannal (1791-1852), a chemist, pharmacist, and inventor, as well as the author of works like Histoire des Embaumements (1838), Mort réelle et mort apparente (1868), Inhumation et crémation (1876), and Les Cimetières (1885).

Holmes eventually settled on a process that involved draining the body of blood and injecting it with an arsenic-based formula, rather than Gannal’s choice of aluminum salts. After a trial period beginning in October of 1861, in which Holmes charged $100 per body, the government authorized him to perform the procedure for all fallen soldiers and officers. While most believe that Holmes’ claim to have embalmed "4,028 soldiers and officers, field and staff" during his four years in service is exaggerated, he is known to have preserved the bodies of thousands for burial during this time. His success during wartime created a more general interest in his work, as did his service in embalming the body of President Lincoln after his assassination. The Champion Company, America’s oldest embalming fluid company, was founded in 1878 to meet the demands of this new market.

The work also made Dr. Holmes, who had been wealthy since birth, an even wealthier man for a time, as well as a famous one. His final years, however, were marked by tragedy. Sadly (though perhaps in keeping with our theme), his life in the latter half of the 1890s was marked by a descent into poverty brought about by a deteriorating mental condition that required periodic visits to the from his home in Brooklyn to the Kings County Insane Asylum. According to articles in The Standard Union, Times Union, and The Brooklyn Daily Eagle in the years leading to and including his death, this period was marked by his penning “long incoherent letter[s]” to newspaper editors and exhibiting embalmed animals in his storefront window, much to the excitement of neighborhood children, then graduating to skeletons until he “was compelled to remove them”. According to a November 2, 1900 issue of The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Holmes died on January 8, 1900 of “softening of the brain” while experimenting with embalming gas. It was reported that workmen and officials that arrived to see to his body and the property ultimately removed two mummified monkeys, one preserved monkey head, a “box full of old bones”, as well as the mummified body of “a male child, apparently 11 years old, with head, shoulders and arms missing”, the preserved torso of a young girl, the “almost perfect” preserved head and shoulder of a 14-year old girl who died of “ship fever” forty years previously, and, finally, the body of a six-foot tall man that had been willed to Dr. Holmes before the man’s death. As per a January 9, 1900 issue of the Times Union, “according to [Dr. Thomas Holmes’] last wish, his body [was not] embalmed.”