Pickled To Death

October 22, 2018 8:27 AM

[…] embalming fluid was frequently mistaken for something drinkable like whiskey or beer, or even plain water. I find this a bit baffling. I admit I do not know how vintage embalming fluid smelled, but I would assume that there was enough of a smell to alert the drinker that it wasn’t whiskey. But given the copious amounts of alcohol served to mourners at wakes, were there any alert drinkers? The overflowing cup of cheer (along with an apparent shortage of cups) lies behind many of these tales. “Dead drunk” was no mere figure of speech.
posted by Johnny Wallflower (13 comments total)

My guess is that this largely happened in an era when many medical bottles didn't look too different from the ones that liquor was sold in, especially if you were already half in the bag. Poison warnings were often non-existent, or not particularly obvious (note the small skull on the bottom of the label on the side of the bottle in the linked example).

It does have a very distinct, unpleasant odor, however.

Also note that some of the cases in the article resulted from formaldehyde be used for other purposes.
posted by ryanshepard at 8:37 AM on October 22, 2018

It is especially dangerous when the corpse in question is Keith Moon's.
posted by delfin at 8:39 AM on October 22, 2018 [4 favorites]

From A Sensational Incident at a Wake in New York:

The body was being taken charge of by a friend, who enjoys some reputation as an undertaker...

I like how this was something you could just sort of...dabble in.

But based on that particular story, you can kind of see how this could happen by accident.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 8:45 AM on October 22, 2018 [5 favorites]

The liquid they were ingesting isn't necessarily formaldehyde, which was discovered until 1869, and took a while to enter general use for embalming. Instead, a cocktail of booze and arsenic may have been the culprit.

From Human body preservation – old and new techniques:

The Civil War embalmer experimented with a wide combination of arsenic, creosote, mercury, turpentine and various forms of alcohol. Thomas Holmes, who is said to have performed about 4000 procedures, had developed a fluid ‘free of poisons’ by the outbreak of the war. Arsenic-based solutions were the first generally accepted embalming fluid. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, arsenic was frequently used as an embalming fluid, but has since been supplanted by formaldehyde (Ezugworie et al. 2009).

Modern anatomical preservation
Prior to the introduction of carbolic acid, or phenol, and later of formaldehyde, the main preserving agents used in anatomies were alcoholic solutions of arsenic and/or alumina salts in different concentrations.

posted by zamboni at 8:54 AM on October 22, 2018 [3 favorites]

Dead is the drunkest you can get.
posted by Poldo at 9:18 AM on October 22, 2018

I read Antony Beevor's book "The Fall Of Berlin 1945" once. At the time, I was very depressed, and it cheered me up a lot to read the details of the Nazis getting their asses handed to them. Anyway. As the Red Army advanced, they had a serious problem with their soldiers drinking absolutely anything they could find - industrial solvents, methyl alcohol, gasoline - in hopes of becoming intoxicated. I'm sure they would have eagerly drank embalming fluid.
posted by thelonius at 9:35 AM on October 22, 2018 [3 favorites]

my father, retired history teacher, at a recent lunch: “You know, they used to store arsenic in the pantry next to the sugar, and sometimes people would mix them up!”

me: “yes, Dad, I’ve seen 9 to 5”
posted by roger ackroyd at 9:37 AM on October 22, 2018 [4 favorites]

The liquid they were ingesting isn't necessarily formaldehyde, which was[n't] discovered until 1869, and took a while to enter general use for embalming. Instead, a cocktail of booze and arsenic may have been the culprit.

I wondered about that, since one of the stories involves someone nearly dying from a embalming needle stick. (The person could have been infected from some pathogen in the corpse, too.) The Wikipedia article says that "ingestion of many milliliters is tolerated". I am starting to question my assumption that the frogs that we dissected in biology class in school may not have been preserved in formaldehyde after all, as some people asserted at the time.
posted by Halloween Jack at 10:48 AM on October 22, 2018

thelonius - "... they had a serious problem with their soldiers drinking absolutely anything they could find - industrial solvents, methyl alcohol, gasoline - in hopes of becoming intoxicated."

I've read that there were recipes passed between German soldiers that would get you sick enough to get you off the front line and into a hospital for a few days, one being sugar and gasoline. So there was at least one other reason to ingest poisonous stuff (become in-toxic-ated) besides attempting to get drunk.
posted by King Sky Prawn at 11:35 AM on October 22, 2018 [3 favorites]

regulations? get gubmint out of my booze!
posted by lalochezia at 11:57 AM on October 22, 2018

You can always trust a bartender named Ethel.
posted by BlueHorse at 4:37 PM on October 23, 2018

Where is ColdChef when we need him?
posted by Chrysostom at 9:21 PM on October 26, 2018

Selling drinks at his services, no doubt.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 8:39 PM on October 27, 2018 [1 favorite]