Why Preserve Specimens in Fluid?
Human beings have an innate impulse to collect objects as a way of orienting themselves in the world, as is demonstrated by the long history of collecting and the history of museums (Simmons 2010). The human desire to preserve objects for the future is directly related to the need to make collections. For centuries, the only organic objects that could be kept in collections were those that could be dehydrated—a process that dramatically alters shapes and colors. The discovery in 1662 that organic materials could be preserved in alcohol for an indefinite length of time changed the nature of collections, enabling a greater variety of objects to be preserved.
There is something about preserving things in fluids that sets them apart from other objects—for example, the reactions that people have when they see a mummy in a museum are not the same as their reactions when they see a human body or body part preserved in fluid. In particular, the image of a human fetus in a bottle elicits strong and tangled emotions of awe, attraction, and revulsion, and is an image has been widely used in literature (as discussed next). A specimen floating in a jar of preservative seems to be suspended between life and death, vivid in detail but shrunken, discolored, perpetually in its aqueous environment. The first public presentation of fluid-preserved specimens before the Royal Society generated a lot of interest, as shown by subsequent accounts in the Transactions of members bringing in all sorts of organisms (including a human fetus) that they had preserved in spirits of wine. The anatomical preparations of Frederik Ruysch (see chapter 1) were proclaimed by visitors to the collection as marvelous and extraordinarily life-like. Most contemporary descriptions of the Ruysch specimens seem to describe a standard of preservation that has not been equaled since, although such descriptions should be interpreted in historic context. For example, writing just a hundred years after the death of Ruysch, Jean Nicolas Gannal (1791–1852) opined that:
It is stated, it is true, that Ruysch, had discovered the means of preserving the dead body with all the appearance of life, without drying, with florid complexion, and supple limbs. But, is this really the fact? and have we not good reasons to doubt such assertions, since no collection of anatomical pieces, prepared by this process, has descended to us, and no explanation has confirmed our knowledge of them? (Gannal 1840, 145)
The very act of putting an object in a bottle endows it with powers it did not previously possess. A specimen in fluid seems forever protected from deterioration, cloaked in the authority conveyed by museum collections—the sealed glass jar and the liquid around the specimen keep it at a respectful distance while simultaneously drawing us closer to it. In the preface to a collection of photographs of museum collections, Frans Schouten describes how a museum object is “supplied with a new significance since it has been uprooted from its origin,” and how the photographs “strikingly reflect the alienating effect of the museum” (Thijsen 1990, 1). There is a company in Los Angeles that specializes in costumes and props for movies and theater, and advertises for rent, “A variety of real and replica biological specimens . . . in jars” on their website, claiming that their “prop specimen jar is the largest in the business” and includes “a full term fetal pig” (from 1858), but their most popular specimens are the “all vinyl fetus replicas” (www.bjwinslow.com).
Despite some claims that “A medical museum has little appeal to the general public” (Edwards and Edwards 1959, 2), in fact exhibits of fluid-preserved specimens (particularly medical oddities) have always been a good draw for visitors. Recounting the auction of the Victorian-era Potter Museum, which contained marvelous taxidermy grotesque groups and other specimens collected and preserved by Walter Potter (1835–1918), author Melissa Milgrom described “jars of zoological horrors floating in spirits the color of Kool-Aid” (Milgrom 2010, 174) and observed that, “The more ghastly the specimen, the larger the pre-auction crowd. Nothing drew more people than the Siamese twin fetal piglets in lime green formaldehyde” (Milgrom 2010, 177). The Natural History Museum (London) opened Darwin Centre I in 2002 to house twenty-two million fluid-preserved specimens on 27 km of shelving. Some of the fluid-preserved specimens are on exhibit to the public in an arrangement that gives the museum visitors a glimpse into storage, and guided tours of the collection are very popular with the public. The Berlin Natural History Museum recently opened an exhibit to showcase its specimens of fish, mammals, spiders, amphibians, and reptiles preserved in alcohol (the collection contains more than 276,000 jars in 81,880 L of alcohol on 12.6 km of shelving).
The Fluid-Preserved Human
Human bodies and body parts have long been preserved and often revered, beginning thousands of years before the development of fluid preservation—the process of mummification is labor-intensive and intensely connected to belief in the afterlife, as are the relicts of the saints in Christian tradition, including entire uncorrupted bodies (Cruz 1977, 1984). Medical museums, since their founding, have attracted both the medical community and the general public, but often for very different reasons.
Descriptions of people’s reactions to preserved fetuses are varied. One author wrote that “The two-headed fetus swimming in a jar of formaldehyde makes us feel beautiful, psychologists say” (Christy 2008), while the poet Sylvia Plath narrated in her 1963 novel, The Bell Jar (Plath 1998) how the protagonist (Esther Greenwood) is shown fetuses preserved in jars by her friend, Buddy Willard, who takes her to a hallway “where they had some big glass bottles full of babies that had died before they were born. The baby in the first bottle had a large white head bent over a tiny curved-up body the size of a frog. The baby in the next bottle was bigger and the baby next to that one was bigger still and the baby in the last bottle was the size of a normal baby and he seemed to be looking at me and smiling a little piggy smile” (Plath 1998, 63). For Ester Greenwood, the fetuses were a metaphor for her mental condition. Later, while looking through a magazine, Ester describes how “The face of Eisenhower beamed up at me, bald and blank as the face of a fetus in a bottle” (Plath 1998, 89). Plath used a similar image in her 1960 poem, “A Life,” when she wrote:
With no attachments, like a foetus in a bottle,
The obsolete house, the sea, flattened to a picture
She has one too many dimensions to enter.
Grief and anger, exorcised,
Leave her alone now. (Hughes 2008, 150)
Lawrence Durrell invoked another aspect of the image of a fluid-preserved fetus in Mountolive, the third book of his Alexandria Quartet, when describing an obstinate Egyptian official, “Then he sat with his paws folded over his neat grey waistcoat, glum as a foetus in a bottle, as Mountolive delivered his strongly-worded protest” (Durrell 1958, 251).
The image of a fetus in a bottle is frequently found in other media in popular culture, including the press. In a controversial incident reported by the BBC in 2004, a fourteen-year-old girl, whose baby was stillborn, was given the eleven-week-old fetus in a bottle of formaldehyde to take home when she left the hospital. Her family kept the bottle in the refrigerator before complaining to the County Durham and Darlington Acute Hospitals Trust (BBC, 2004).
In Bangkok one steamy morning, my nephew and I went to see the Museum of Pathology at Sirijit Hospital. The exhibit area is arranged as an old-fashioned teaching institution, which in itself is fascinating (we have lost a lot in museums by making displays that are more eye-catching than they are information-presenting). Most of the pathology specimens were on exhibit in beautiful old glass containers, awash in formaldehyde and other fluid preservatives. Despite the poor lighting and label text mostly in Thai, the pathologies we saw were fascinating—carcinomas, lesions, gout, tissue from brains damaged by stroke. However, the other visitors (almost all Thais) were most interested in the fetuses. There were a surprising number of fetuses, all with some serious problem (including conjoined twins, spina bifida, anocephalgia, and cleft palette). But these were not fetuses glum in their bottles—despite the terrible deformities (and in some cases, dissections and crude postautopsy stitches), most of the fetuses wore serene expressions as they floated in their jars, hovering quietly just beyond the thin line that separates life and death. Each container that held a fetus was mounted on a platform wide enough to allow the placement of objects around it. The objects that surrounded the fetuses included toys, candy and gum, little images of the Buddha, photos of revered monks, paper airplanes, hair barrettes, coins, plastic bracelets, and handwritten notes. Were these objects left by the parents of children born with similar problems, or perhaps by expectant couples feverishly hoping for a healthy baby? In any case, it was a reminder that what is repulsive and grotesque to one person might be of great interest or be emotionally supportive to another. Each fetus in its glass container compelled you to look closer, to stare, to wonder, simultaneously attracting and repelling as only a grotesque can.
Human body parts preserved in fluids are kept for many reasons. In a short story published in Granta magazine, an aging diabetic who lives in a small building on the same property as his divorced wife is trying to cope with the phantom pain from his amputated foot, but “Sometimes he has a panicky thought that they gave it to Jeanne; in a jar, like a tonsil. And that she has it up there in the house, with all his things” (Peelle 2008, 137). In an oddly parallel situation in real life, an incident was reported in Lawrence, Kansas, of an individual who kept his amputated foot in a plastic bucket of formaldehyde and charged his friends to view it (Weslander 2005). When a neighbor complained, police confiscated the foot and held it until they were sure that no crime had been committed. A hospital spokesperson was quoted as saying that it was not unusual for people to take their own body parts home in formaldehyde, noting that in the past, “They’ve had women that want their uterus. People take tonsils. They take appendixes. I think it’s unusual that someone would want a foot, but it’s within their rights because it’s theirs.” The report went on to quote the owner of the foot as saying that “he cut off two toes, which he was considering giving to friends. He added trinkets to the bucket, including a porcelain horse and a can of Hamm’s beer, to make it what he called ‘a collage of myself.’” There are many other examples of the fetishism of body parts preserved in fluid, such as an exotic dancer in South Plainfield, New Jersey, who was found to have decorated her apartment with a variety of skulls and a “crudely severed human hand in a mason jar of formaldehyde” that she kept on her dresser; the hand was nicknamed “Freddy” (Associated Press 2006).
In a paper titled “Vision, Headache, and the Halo—Reactions to Stress in the Course of Superego Formation,” Greenacre (1947) reports on a patient who clung to the image of body parts in a jar as a repressive coping mechanism:
Her third year was especially eventful. She had a tonsillectomy under a general anaesthetic; afterwards she was given the excised tonsils in a bottle of preservative to cherish as a momento of the occasion. The patient had been in an adjoining room when her mother miscarried, had gone into her mother’s bathroom and discovered something in a pail as well as bloody linen. This made a profound impression and had the effect of an overwhelming visual trauma, but was dealt with by fairly quick repression, being fused with the memory of the tonsils in the bottle. (Greenachre 1947, 179–180)
One of the more unusual stories involving a fluid-preserved body part was Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip across America with Einstein’s Brain (Paterniti 2000), a classic road story but with a Tupperware container of formaldehyde thrown in. Paterniti, a freelance journalist, stumbled on the story of pathologist Thomas Harvey, who performed the autopsy on Albert Einstein (1879–1955). Apparently against the family’s wishes, Harvey had removed the brain during the autopsy, preserved and sectioned it, and kept the cubes in a container of formaldehyde for decades, always intending to study it but never getting around to it. Paterniti’s book tells the story of how he drove Harvey and the brain in a Buick Skylark from New Jersey to California to hand the preserved brain over to Einstein’s granddaughter.
Human body parts are sometimes preserved as a memorial of the dead. During his ill-fated war against the Russian empire, one of Napoleon’s soldiers had the heart cut out of the body of his fallen brother and preserved in a container of wine so it could be carried back to the family in France (Talty 2009). After his death from tuberculosis in Paris in 1849 at the age of thirty-nine, and by his prior request, Frederic Chopin’s heart was removed and sealed in a vessel described as a crystal urn filled with alcohol (probably brandy or cognac). The heart, in its urn, was later taken to Poland by Chopin’s sister, Ludwika. A request to perform a DNA analysis of the heart to determine whether or not Chopin had died of cystic fibrosis instead of tuberculosis was made in 2008, but denied by Polish authorities (Anon. 2008). In Mexico City, in a city park called La Bombilla on the Avenida de los Insurgentes, stands a large tower-like monument that once held a fluid-preserved right arm and hand. The monument commemorates Álvaro Obregón (1880–1928), who—after a distinguished military career—served as president of Mexico from 1920 to 1924. On July 3, 1915, during a battle at Santa Ana de Conde, General Obregón’s right arm was shot off. The arm was preserved in fluid (most modern sources say in formaldehyde, but it was probably alcohol) by the attending surgeon. On July 17, 1928, Obregón had just been elected to a second term as president, but had not yet taken office, when he was assassinated at a restaurant near where the monument now stands. Obregón’s preserved arm was exhibited in the monument from its dedication in 1935 until around 1999, when the relic was either stolen or removed from view.
One of the most famous preserved bodies is that of Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924). Although technically the body is embalmed rather than preserved in fluid, the son of one of the men who embalmed Lenin wrote that among the preservation options considered was immersion in a “balsamic liquid” made up of glycerin and potassium acetate (Zbarsky and Hutchinson 1997).
A European traveler in 1823 recorded an example of a human body preserved in brandy and displayed to the public:
Among the delightful villas on the north side of Geneva, there is one at Pregni, once belonging to the empress Josephine. Since her death, it was purchased with the gardens and grounds, by our friend, Mr. M., with whom we dined soon after our arrival at Geneva, and had an opportunity of seeing the apartments: they are spacious and commodious, and well suited for the enjoyment of an unostentatious but elegant retirement. A few miles farther east, on the same side of the lake, is situated the château of the late Madame de Stael at Copey. It contains the body of her mother, Madame Neckar, full dressed, and preserved in brandy, by her own particular request. In this singular state it was shown to visitors for several years, but the vault which contained it, was closed a little before we were there. The early attachment of our historian Gibbon to this lady, will preserve her memory much longer than brandy can preserve her body; and the austerity of her temper and singularity of her disposition are sufficiently known by the writings of her daughter. (Bakewell 1823, 68–69)
(Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein (1766–1817) was a writer and political activist.)
A jar of alcohol containing the head of a man thought to be the Mexican bandit Joaquin Murieta has been sold at auction several times. According to various accounts, after a gun fight, the mutilated hand of one bandit and the head of Murieta were “cut off and preserved in spirits” by rangers who took their trophies to the capital of Sacramento to collect their reward for capturing the bandits (Jackson 1977, 10). In a literary parallel, one of the characters in the 2010 novel Iron River by T. Jefferson Parker keeps the head of a Mexican bandit in a jar of alcohol at his home.
One of the more ghoulish fascinations with fluid preservation relates to the fact that such specimens are sometimes consumed. In the World War II novel, The Good Soldier Švejk, a visit to a graveyard reveals the final resting place of a person who’s death was caused by fluid preservatives when a grave is found with a headstone that reads, “A. Honvéd who plundered the school collections and drank up all the methylated spirit from a jar in which the various reptiles were being preserved now sleeps his last sleep there” (Hašek 1973, 625). This story has a strange parallel in real life—there are accounts of the starving soldiers in the Grand Army of Napoleon, during their disastrous retreat from Moscow in 1812, raiding the medical school at the University of Vilnius (in present-day Lithuania) and consuming the alcohol-preserved specimens (Lobell 2002; Thadeusz 2009). When the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer was arrested in 1991, it was discovered that he had cooked and eaten parts of some of his victims, and that his apartment contained “a fifty-seven gallon blue plastic drum filled with what appeared to be formaldehyde, in which three headless torsos were marinating” (Baumann 1991, 48) and several bottles of ethyl alcohol and formaldehyde were found in the closet. Other reports detailed how Dahmer dismembered the corpses and saved various parts, primarily the skulls, which he cleaned chemically in his apartment. After his arrest, “A thorough search of Dahmer’s Milwaukee apartment turned up body parts of eleven of his victims—some boiled, stripped of flesh, and painted, and others preserved in formaldehyde like lab specimens” (Ewing and McCann 2006, 145).
Fond Memories of Fluid Preservation
In some cases, fluid-preserved objects are remembered in a more positive light. A case was reported in the press of a specimen of a two-headed piglet, preserved in alcohol, that was stolen in 1999 from an environmental education center in Wisconsin, after being on exhibit for forty years (along with a four-legged pheasant chick and a pair of conjoined raccoons). The center received a number of calls from concerned citizens who were familiar with the exhibit, and at least one offer from a local farmer of a two-bodied, one-headed piglet as a replacement. The specimen was eventually returned, anonymously, to the museum (Balousek 2000).
In his book of essays entitled Broca’s Brain, scientist and writer Carl Sagan (1979) used the preserved brain of pioneer neurologist Pierre Paul Broca (1824–1880) as an inspiration point to muse on the nature of being human. Broca’s brain was preserved along with hundreds of others in the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro at a time when it was believed that the study of brain anatomy could shed light on how humans think (Broca’s brain is now in the Musée de l’Homme in Paris). Although the study of preserved human brains has not revealed the secrets of memory and thought, it has played a critical role in the development of neurology. The Cushing Center, housed in the Yale Medical School Library, contains 50,000 pages of notes and 15,000 photographic negatives documenting more than 2,200 neurological case studies made by the pioneering neurologist Harvey Cushing (1869–1939), along with 650 jars of preserved brains from Cushing’s patients (Blair 2010; Epstein 2010; Greenberg 1996). Although the brains currently have minimal research value, they are still useful to show pathologies and surgeries to medical students. The brains and the jars they are in were carefully cleaned and incorporated into the study center, more for their aesthetic value than their teaching value (see figure 6.1).
In a delightful book about his childhood discovery of chemistry, neurologist Oliver Sacks lamented the loss of his pet octopus (killed by the maid who found it soaking in the bath), writing that “I dissected it, sorrowfully, when I got back to London, to learn what I could, and kept its scattered remains in formalin in my bedroom for many years” (Sacks 2001, 234). Later, Sacks and two friends collected cuttlefish which they attempted to preserve in “a little alcohol” so they could take them back to school for their class to dissect (Sacks 2001, 273). Unfortunately, this experiment was not successful:
A few days later . . . we heard dull thuds emanating from the basement, and going down to investigate, we encountered a grotesque scene: the cuttlefish, insufficiently preserved, had putrefied and fermented, and the gases produced had exploded the jars and blown great lumps of cuttlefish all over the walls and floor; there were even shreds of cuttlefish stuck to the ceiling. The intense smell of putrefaction was awful beyond imagination. We did our best to scrape off the walls and remove the exploded, impacted lumps of cuttlefish and hosed down the basement, gagging, but the stench was not to be removed, and when we opened the windows and doors to air out the basement, it extended outside the house as a sort of miasma for fifty yards in every direction. (Sacks 2001, 273–274)
Figure 6.1. Fluid-preserved brain specimens on exhibit at the Cushing Center, Yale University Medical School Library. Photo by Terry Dagradi, Cushing Center, Yale University.
Fluid Preservation in Visual Art
Images of objects preserved in fluid are relatively rare in visual art, aside from a few depictions of alcohol distillation in the alchemical literature (Roob 2001) and some intriguing jars sealed with bladders in some woodcuts and paintings of alchemical laboratories. There are a few jars of fluid-preserved specimens visible in some of the woodcuts of cabinets of curiosities (e.g., Mauriès 2002). Fluid-preserved specimens are included in a painting by Jean Valette Penot (1710–1777) entitled Trompe l’Oeil a la Statuette d’Hercule (a trompe l’oeil refers to a technique that uses realistic images to create a three-dimensional optical illusion). The painting (now in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Remes, France) shows several objects arranged on three shelves in a cabinet, including two jars containing fluid (and presumably, fluid-preserved specimens) on the lower shelf, one sealed with a bladder, the other with a glass stopper. The portrait of Albertus Seba (1665–1736) produced by Jan Maurits Quinkhard (1688-1772) shows Seba standing in front of his collection of fluid-preserved specimens, holding a jar with a snake in it in one hand, while pointing to shells, loose drawings, and an opened copy of his printed catalog with his other hand (Müsch 2001; Simmons and Snider 2012). A 1907 caricature by the anarchist artist Gustave-Henri Jossot (1866–1951), showing a deranged mortician drinking formaldehyde that had been used to preserve a dead fetus, was published in the social protest journal, L’Assiette au Beurre.
A few artists have used fluid-preserved objects directly in their work. Joseph Cornell (1903–1972) used old glass jars with glass stoppers, some filled with unknown fluids, in several of his series of works known as Pharmacy and Museum, created over a ten-year period, beginning in 1943 (Hartigan et al. 2003). The best-known modern artist to use fluid-preserved objects is Damien Hirst, who has used fluid preservation in several art projects, most notably preserving sheep, cows, and sharks in formaldehyde. A work consisting of a large shark in a tank of formaldehyde, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, was commissioned in 1992 for £50,000, and later sold to another collector for £6.5 million. In 2006, it was reported in the press that the shark was badly deteriorating due to poor preservation techniques, including the failure to inject the preservative into the tissues or body cavity of the shark (Ruiz and Harris 2006). As the shark was reported to have “decomposed until its form changed, its skin grew deeply wrinkled and the solution in the tank turned murky,” staff members at the Saatchi Gallery inexplicably added bleach to the formaldehyde solution in the tank. When the deteriorating shark was being replaced by his crew, Hirst was quoted as saying that “Three different lengths of needles are being used to inject the shark with formaldehyde. The last shark was never injected, so it decayed from the inside” (Vogel 2006).
Mary Cate Carrol is an American artist who produced a painting titled American Liberty Upside Down. The painting shows a man and woman sitting on a couch. A child is depicted on the mother’s lap by a red dotted outline. Inside the outline is an actual door that can be opened to see a fetus preserved in formaldehyde. Due to controversy over the presence of the fetus, the artwork was removed from a show at Mary Washington College just before the opening, which ultimately led to a lawsuit that was settled out of court; the college exhibited the piece two years later.
American artist Tracy Hicks has done several installations based on the theme of treasures stored in jars in museum vaults, using a variety objects in different fluids, including alcohol, oils, and beet juice. Participation in a scientific expedition to Central America in 1997 led to Hicks incorporating themes of ecology and disappearing amphibians into this work. In 2005, Hicks exhibited an installation called Two Cultures: Collection at the Hall Center for the Humanities at the University of Kansas (see figure 6.2). The installation was composed of 1,300 urethane and silicon casts (treated with phosphorescent pigments and fluorescent dyes) of seventy-nine species of frogs (many endangered, some extinct) from the fluid-preserved scientific collections at the Field Museum (Chicago) and the Biodiversity Institute at the University of Kansas (Anon. 2005; Hill 2005). The project was funded by two grants from the Museum Loan Network (MLN) to Marjorie Swann (professor in the Department of English) and John E. Simmons (Director of the Museum Studies Program and Collections Manager in the Biodiversity Institute) to address how scientific specimens, as objects of cultural patrimony, reflect our interpretations of the diversity of life, and to interrogate the intersection of science and art. By using fluorescent pigments and colored fluids in the jars holding the casts of the frogs, Hicks drew attention to the aesthetics of scientific collections and the mystery of amphibian declines worldwide.
Figure 6.2. Tracy Hicks’s installation, Two Cultures: Collection at the Hall Center for the Humanities at the University of Kansas. Photo by Tracy Hicks.
Fluid Preservation in Literature
A very early occurrence of the word alcohol can be found in a fifteenth-century Spanish ballad, La Misa de Amor (Menéndez Pidal 1968; Turnbull 1955). At the time, the word alcohol had recently entered Spanish from the Arabic al kohl, and referred not to spirit of wine but to a black powder (see Origin of the Name Alcohol in chapter 1):
En la su boca muy linda
lleva un poco de dulzor;
el la su cara tan blanca
un poquito de arrebol,
y un los sus ojuelos garzos
lleva un poco de alcohol
(Menéndez Pidal 1968, 251–252)
References to fluid-preserved objects and specimens abound in literature, often in a context of showing the amorality of scientists and scientific practices. For example, Charles Kingsley parodied the discovery that all primates had a hippocampus in his 1863 children’s book, The Water Babies, later writing that if a water baby had ever been found, “they would have put it into spirits, or into the Illustrated News, or perhaps cut it into two halves, poor dear little thing, and sent one to Professor Owen and one to Professor Huxley, to see what they could each say about it” (Gould 1979, 50). At the time, Richard Owen (1804–1892) and Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) were engaged in a public argument over the validity of the theory of evolution as proposed in Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (published in 1859).
A more common theme associated with references to fluid preservation is a context of repulsion or horror. In a 1943 novel set in equatorial Africa, Congo Song (by Stuart Cloete), the laboratory of the French doctor at a remote agricultural station is described as containing “rows of jars and bottles neatly labeled, filled with gruesome-looking medical specimens bleached white by the alcohol in which they were preserved.” In The History of the Ginger Man, an autobiographical account by J. P. Donleavy of the writing of his well-known novel, a reference to body parts in formaldehyde is used as an image of repulsion:
I would, in the cool of the morning, stroll each day, passing the back of the Massachusetts General Hospital, this reminding one of one’s mortality. For above the large black morgue doors were the windows of the pathology lab, where one could see steeping in formaldehyde the specimens of brains, liver, lungs, and kidneys in their glass jars. (Donleavy 1994, 205)
In the epilogue to H. G. Wells’s 1898 novel, The War of the Worlds, the narrator recounts that, “The results of an anatomical examination of the Martians, so far as the prowling dogs had left such an examination possible, I have already given. But everyone is familiar with the magnificent and almost complete specimen in spirits at the Natural History Museum, and the countless drawings that have been made from it; and beyond that the interest of their physiology and structure is purely scientific” (Wells 2005, 178). In Mikhail Bulgakov’s (1891–1940) novel, The White Guard, the protagonist, Nikolka, interrupts a professor in his laboratory, in the midst of his dissection of a human corpse, to ask permission to search among the bodies in the morgue for his slain commanding officer. The scene illustrates the lack of morality among scientists (Lessing 2003):
Nikolka took off his cap, noticing the gleaming black blinds drawn low over the windows and a beam of painfully bright light falling on to a desk, behind which was a black beard, a crumpled, exhausted face, and a hooked nose. Then he glanced nervously around the walls at the line of shiny, glass-fronted cabinets containing rows of monstrous things in bottles, brown and yellow, like hideous Chinese faces. (Bulgakov 1971, 269)
A reference to the preservation of Lenin’s brain occurs in the 1959 dissident novel, The Trial Begins, by Andrei Sinyavsky (1929–1997), set in a Siberian prison camp. The character Globov is guided through the “Puskin Museum of Fine Arts” by another character named “Citizen Rabinovich.” Rabinovich takes Globov through a door labeled “A great end gives rise to great energy” where Globov sees “an empty space and, in the middle of it, a glass jar containing a human brain preserved in spirits. It was ridged and furrowed like the crust of the earth. Its two hemispheres throbbed slowly. Around them, a pale green solution flowed through a system of fine tubes and retorts” (Tertz 1982, 69). The scene is reminiscent of a 1930 short story by H. P. Lovecraft, The Whisperer in Darkness, which had a slight twist on the preservation in fluid theme—the narrator discovers a number of metal cylinders in a remote farmhouse in the hills of Vermont that contain the surgically extracted brains of several humans, “immersed in an occasionally replenished fluid within an ether-tight cylinder” but kept alive for travel through outer space (Lovecraft 2012, 518).
The Sherwood Anderson (1876–1941) story, The Egg (first published in 1921 as The Triumph of the Egg), concerns a farmer who became obsessed with his collection of deformed chickens, “preserved in alcohol and each put in its own glass bottle” (Modlin 1992). The farmer and his wife opened a restaurant, and the farmer kept the jars of preserved deformed chickens on display despite his wife’s objections because “The grotesques were, he declared, valuable. People, he said, liked to look at strange and wonderful things.” The story has a parallel in real life in the form of Henry Thomford, who kept a three-headed chicken in a jar of alcohol to show to travelers at his store (Lorge et al. 2005).
Perhaps the best-known fluid preservation laboratory in fiction was the one that belonged to the character Doc, the marine biologist in John Steinbeck’s 1945 novel, Cannery Row. The laboratory was described as containing shelves crammed with preserved specimens, an injecting and embalming sink in the basement, and concrete tanks for large specimens outside, all permeated with chemical smells. In the novel, Steinbeck spelled formalin as “formaline,” one of several variant spellings based on trade names for commercial formaldehyde solutions (Steinbeck 1973, 22).
In the 1981 novel Brain by surgeon and novelist Robin Cook, a neuro-radiologist named Martin Philips discovers an evil plot in a hospital involving connecting disembodied brains to computers. Despite the fact that they are medical professionals, each time a character sees a preserved human brain, he or she becomes nauseated, beginning with Philips when he makes an unauthorized visit to the pathology lab and finds “a series of bookshelves containing glass jars; a whole group of which held brains immersed in preserving fluid” (Cook 1981, 139). Philips takes one of the preserved brains to the X-ray department where “The technician took one look at the brain and turned green” (Cook 1981, 141). Philips places the preserved brain on a paper plate and makes the X-ray himself, but “on all the films it was difficult to make out the internal structure” because “even though the brain had been in formaldehyde, the internal structure must have decomposed enough to blur any radiological definition” (Cook 1981, 141). Philips then carries the brain to his office, where he decides to excise a critical piece of brain tissue and see if it is radioactive enough to fog X-ray film. He asks his secretary, Helen, to get him a knife. “Helen got the one from the peanut butter jar by the coffee urn, marveling at her weird boss. When she returned to this office, she gagged, unprepared for what she saw. Philips was lifting a human brain out of a formaldehyde jar, and putting it on a newspaper, its familiar convolutions glistening in the light from the X-ray viewer. Fighting off a wave of nausea, Helen watched as Philips proceeded to cut a ragged slice from the back of the specimen. After returning the brain to the formaldehyde he headed for the door, carrying the slice of brain on the newspaper” (Cook 1981, 153). Later, after the film is exposed, Philips dumps the “now dried-up slice of brain” (Cook 1981, 158) in a wastebasket.
Fluid preservation is featured in several murder mysteries. In the novel The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris (1988) the degree of evil practiced by a psychotic killer is demonstrated by a severed head found in a jar in the killer’s car. In Mr. Smithson’s Bones, a murder mystery set at the Smithsonian Institution, the head of one victim was severed and hidden in a jar of fluid in a collection of preserved anemones. The narrator explains that “I put it in a large jar in alcohol and placed it on the back of a shelf in the invertebrate zoology storage area. . . . It is with the sea anemones. I turned Rebecca’s face to the back so all you can see is her hair. It looked rather like an anemone, I thought” (Conroy 1993, 185). The mystery novel Critique of Criminal Reason opens with a description of a human head preserved in a jar of alcohol, “like a large conch-shell in the swelling sea” (Gregorio 2006, 10). In Black Notice, a medical examiner uses formaldehyde as a defensive weapon when she is attacked by a psychopathic killer. The medical examiner happens to have a jar of formaldehyde in her living room (in which is a preserved piece of skin she removed during an autopsy to attempt to identify a tattoo). When the killer attacks her, the medical examiner opens the jar and throws the liquid in his face. The description of the killer’s reaction is an accurate account of what would probably happen: “He shrieked and grabbed his eyes and throat as the chemical burned and made it difficult for him to breathe. He squeezed shut his eyes, shrieking and grabbing at his doused shirt to rip it off, gasping and burning like fire as I ran” (Cornwall 1999, 318). The killer is captured moments later as he rubs snow in his face. In an earlier book by the same author, an expert medical examiner asks to see the brain of a murder victim that was removed by a small-town coroner, and explains that, “It is not uncommon for pathologists to fix brains in a ten percent solution of formaldehyde called formalin. The chemical process preserves and firms tissue. It makes further studies possible, especially in cases involving trauma to this most incredible and least understood of human organs” (Cornwall 1994, 95). However, neither the coroner nor the medical examiner follow good safety procedures—the coroner retrieves the brain from a plastic bucket beneath the sink, lifts out the brain, and lays it on a cutting board, while the narrator describes “fumes from the formaldehyde burning my eyes” (Cornwall 1994, 95).
The capture of a giant squid (Architeuthis dux), some 8.62 m in length, in 2004 drew worldwide attention, particularly after it was acquired by The Natural History Museum (London). The British press nicknamed the squid Archie and closely followed its subsequent preservation. The squid had been frozen after capture and remained on ice for its first six months at the Natural History Museum as staff consulted with experts on what to do with it. Ultimately, the squid was thawed, injected with 15 L of buffered 10 percent formalin and installed in a nine-meter-long custom-made tank in a special room in the basement of the museum (Ablett 2012), where it is accessible to the public on special tours. The story of the giant squid led to the publication of a novel about a cult that worships preserved giant squid, Kraken: An Anatomy (Miéville 2010). In the novel, Billy Harrow, a curator at the British Museum, takes a group of visitors on a tour of the Darwin Centre through the “specimen maze” so that they can see “The specimens mindlessly concentrated, some posing with their own colourless guts. Flatfish in browning tanks. Jars of huddled mice gone sepia, grotesque mouthfuls like pickled onions. There were sports with excess limbs, fetuses in arcane shapes. They were as carefully shelved as books” (Miéville 2010, 8). In the novel (as in real life), the star attraction of the tour is the 8.62-meter-long giant squid, described as being preserved “in a saline-Formalin mix.” When Harrow leads his tour group to the basement, he discovers that the squid has been stolen, nine-meter-long custom tank and all. As the plot thickens, Harrow finds a human stuffed into a glass jar full of fluid preservative. Later in the novel, Harrow is rescued by a “memory angel” from the museum in the form of an animated giant preserving jar with a skull on its lid and whirling skeletal arms that defends him until its glass is shattered by an untimely tossed brick. Harrow realizes that the odd glass-clinking noise he has been hearing faintly for some time is the memory angel keeping an eye on him. At the climax of the story, the stolen giant squid in its tank of formaldehyde is at last found in the back of a moving truck being driven around London by the cultists, who pray to the creature for guidance. A final battle takes place against a villain who wishes to extract the “ink” (a sepia-colored fluid which has, in fact, been used as ink in the past) from the preserved squid. Billy Harrow, the curator, is able to save London from the arch villain by exclaiming that the preserved squid was not a kraken but “a specimen. I know. I made it. That’s ours” (Miéville 2010, 487), and then claiming that he is no more than “a bottle prophet” (Miéville 2010, 488).
In a Lord Peter Wimsey story, The Piscatorial Farce of the Stolen Stomach, a human alimentary canal that is “enclosed in a proper preservative medium in a glass vessel” (Sayers 1972, 195) is stolen from a medical student’s cottage (the stomach was bequeathed to the student by his great-uncle). Wimsey figures out that the stomach was stolen because it contained diamonds. Although the jar is broken by the burglar, Wimsey eventually locates the preserved organ in the river, where it “like a drab purse, lay on the shore” (Sayers 1972, 209) being pecked by gulls. Wimsey and his friend slice the stomach open and find most of the diamonds still there.
The protagonist of the novel, A River Town, is an Irish immigrant store owner in Australia in 1900 who is haunted by the face of a young woman whose head was kept in a jar of preservative by the police, in the hope that she would eventually be identified (Keneally 1996). This incident has historical precedence—in 1869, a stranger was found murdered in a vacant lot in Spring Valley, New York. A newspaper account stated that “The head and face presented a most ghastly appearance, being mutilated by five ugly wounds. The right eye was entirely gone, and portions of the face had been gnawed off by field mice” (Anon. 1871). Nevertheless, in hopes of identifying the victim, “The mutilated head was severed from the trunk and preserved in alcohol for identification. During the sessions of the inquest thousands of persons inspected the remains, but failed to identify them” (Anon. 1871). Almost a month after the discovery of the body, the victim was identified, and eventually the murderer was caught, brought to trial, and convicted.
Fluid Preservation in Film
Fluid-preserved specimens as metaphors for repulsion, horror, the amorality of science, and sometimes just to establish how odd a character is are common themes in films, as in literature. In the 1985 teen romantic comedy, Better Off Dead (directed by Savage Steve Holland), Charles DeMar plays a character who spends a lot of class time staring at a pickled pig fetus that he carries around in a jar of formaldehyde.
A more typical use of the fluid preservation metaphor occurs in the 1932 film version of The Most Dangerous Game in which a rich hunter, bored with big game, has taken to tracking and shooting human victims. Two shipwrecked strangers who wash up on the hunter’s island (Bob Rainsford and Eve Trowbridge) sneak into the secret trophy room of the exiled Russian sportsman Count Zaroff. As the pair tries to hide when they hear the count approaching, Eve bumps into a large glass jar in which a human head is suspended in preservative. The head sways ominously as Count Zaroff enters the room. In Surviving the Game (1994, directed by Ernest R. Dickerson), a film based on the same plot device as The Most Dangerous Game, the human victim of the hunt, Jack Mason, discovers a number of human heads preserved in jars of alcohol in the hunting club’s trophy room. To escape his captors, Mason sets the trophy room ablaze.
The version of Frankenstein that is best known today (the 1931 film version from Universal Pictures, directed by James Whale) severely distorts the theme of Mary Shelley’s novel (Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, 1818). The monster of Shelley’s novel is not inherently evil, but becomes evil in reaction to how he is treated by the humans he encounters. By contrast, in the 1931 film version, the monster is evil due to his biological destiny (because a “criminal brain” was mistakenly implanted in his skull). The idea of the addition of the criminal brain is unique to the film (it is not in the novel). Dr. Frankenstein’s hunchbacked assistant, Fritz (played by Dwight Frye) goes to the Goldstadt Medical College to steal a preserved brain. Fritz breaks into the locked lecture room after the professor leaves two brains in jars of fluid on the podium for the “further inspection” of the students. The jar containing the normal brain is in a clear fluid preservative, while the jar containing the criminal brain is in a cloudy fluid preservative. After accidentally dropping the jar with the good brain, Fritz leaves with the jar containing the criminal brain. Mel Brooks’s 1974 parody, Young Frankenstein, comes much closer to portraying the character of the monster as in the Mary Shelley novel. In Young Frankenstein, the hunchbacked assistant (now named Igor), is sent to the “Brain Depository” to fetch a perfect brain. When Igor arrives, the building is closed; a sign on the door reads, “After 5:00 p.m. shove brain through slot in door.” Igor breaks in to find row after row of brains in jars and under glass domes, each labeled with the name of a famous donor, including several who died long before fluid preservation was practiced (e.g., Albertus Magus and Cornelius Agrippa). Igor removes the jar containing the brain of Hans Delbruck, “scientist and saint” (the real Hans Delbrück, 1848–1929, was a German scholar who specialized in the history of war) but drops the jar when startled by his own image in a mirror. The brain is destroyed in the fall, so Igor grabs the preserved brain nearest him (labeled “Do not use this brain! Abnormal”) and returns to the castle.
Fluid-preserved specimens make an appearance in the 1954 Walt Disney film version of the 1870 Jules Verne novel, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. The sailor Ned Land (Kirk Douglas), wishing to escape captivity on board Captain Nemo’s submarine, Nautilus, decides to put messages in bottles and throw them overboard, so he orders Conseil (Peter Lorre), a timid scientist, to fetch several jars of preserved specimens. Conseil brings Ned the specimens and announces that, “You’ve got everything here from the rarest nudibrach to oysters.” Ned replies that “Oysters are out of season. Dump them in the sink, all of them. I just want the bottles,” to which Conseil replies, “You can’t do that, these are priceless.” Ned pulls the cork from a bottle and raises the bottle to his nose, and then says, somewhat surprised, “Alcohol,” Conseil replies “Pure alcohol,” at which point Ned pulls a specimen of a fish from the bottle and drops it in the sink, saying “We’ll just drain the pollywogs out and save the grot,” and begins pouring the alcohol into a pitcher. The incident with specimens in jars is not in the original text of the novel.
A 1961 film, Night Tide, written and directed by Curtis Harrington, used a human hand floating in a jar of preservative to reinforce the threat of evil lurking in the character Captain Samuel Murdock. A sailor named Johnny Drake has fallen in love with Murdock’s adopted daughter, Mora. While Murdock is warning Drake that a relationship with Mora will be fatal, he instructs him to open a cabinet to fetch a fresh bottle of gin. When Drake opens the door, he is stunned to see the grisly hand in preservative. Murdock nonchalantly explains “Oh, don’t be alarmed, that is just a little Arabian souvenir, the hand of a thief. The Mohammedans punish their thieves by removing the offending portions of the body. Rather gruesome, but logical, don’t you think?” to which Drake asks, “How did you ever get that?” Murdock replies that “It was a gift from the Sultan of Marakesh. He knew I collected odd things and he sent it to me. Rather thoughtful of him,” to which Drake mumbles, “Yeah, it’s very interesting.”
In the Icelandic murder mystery Jar City by Arnaldur Indridason (2000), a detective locates the preserved brain of a long-dead five-year-old girl in the private collection of a retired pathologist, although it had originally been in a state-owned research collection nicknamed Jar City. In the story, the pathologist explains that the heart of Louis XVII (the son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette) was preserved in formaldehyde and later matched by DNA to the royal family, despite the fact that formaldehyde had not been discovered at the time and damages DNA. In 2006 the book was made into a movie, called Mýrin (directed by Baltasar Kormákur), which included scenes of fluid-preserved body parts. In fact, Louis XVII’s heart was preserved in alcohol after his death in 1795. The specimen was allowed to evaporate eight to ten years later, so that at the time of the DNA testing, the heart had become completely dehydrated (Jehaes et al. 2001).
The 1995 film, Margaret’s Museum (directed by Mort Ransen) is set in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, in the 1940s. The story is based on the Sheldon Curie novel, The Glace Bay Miner’s Museum. The protagonist, Margaret MacNeil (Helena Bonham Carter), opens a museum containing body parts of miners killed on the job in fluid preservative—her husband’s tongue, lungs, and fingers; her brother’s penis; and her grandfather’s lungs. The film depicts Margaret preparing labels for the specimen jars before a visitor, horrified at the exhibit, runs screaming from the museum.
In at least one film, the protagonist is saved by an unusual use of fluid preservative (similar to the medical examiner in the novel Black Notice, discussed earlier). The Relic (1997, directed by Peter Hyams) is set in a contemporary natural history museum in Chicago. There are several scenes showing racks of fluid-preserved specimens in storage. At one point a curator, Dr. Green, carries a couple of jars by hand from her lab to place them on the shelving. At the climax of the film, a monster (described as a Kothoga) pursues Dr. Greene through a research wing of the museum. To kill the monster, Dr. Greene knocks scores of fluid-preserved specimens to the ground and opens the spigots on several containers of bulk alcohol, then ignites the fluid using an incendiary chemical mixture she has managed to concoct while fleeing the Kothoga. To escape the explosion and fire, Dr. Greene climbs into a maceration tank (presumably filled with water and not yet in use) and closes the lid.
Fluid Preservation in Popular Culture
Writers of nonfiction have also employed the image of a preserved specimen to evoke horror and repulsion. A noted big-game hunter of the early twentieth century described how he was badly mauled when attacked by a lion. Back in camp, the hunter related how he dressed his own wounds and “cut off a joint of my right middle finger as it was only just hanging on. I put this amputated finger-joint into alcohol and sent it home to the Museum with the rest of my specimens, and there they noticed the marks of arsenic poisoning under the nail and perceived how busy I had been collecting birds and preparing them for dispatch” (Kittenberger 1989, 27).
During the time of the Jack the Ripper murders in London (the fall of 1888), the president of the Vigilance Committee formed to help catch the murderer received a parcel through the mail that contained a longitudinal section of a kidney, presumably from Jack the Ripper’s fourth victim, Catherine Eddowes, whose left kidney had been removed when she was killed and mutilated two weeks before (on the night of September 29–30, 1888). Medical authorities who examined the specimen concluded that the kidney had been preserved in alcohol shortly after the murder (before it was sent to the committee president). However, later writers have cautioned that the kidney may have come from an anatomical specimen unrelated to Jack the Ripper’s victims (Wolf 2008). In March 2009 the severed head of King Badu Bonsu II of Ghana, which had been cut off sometime in the 1830s, was discovered preserved in an anatomical collection at the Leiden University Medical Center by Dutch writer Arthur Japin, who was conducting background research for a historic novel. After the discovery, the medical center repatriated the head to Ghana.
Because humans have long consumed alcohol, it seems entirely logical that there would be a convergence of alcohol as a beverage and a preservative—indeed, in many Asian countries, animals (particularly snakes) are often preserved in rice wine which is then consumed as a medicine or tonic, usually to promote longevity and virility (Stutesman 2005). In some formulations, a live snake is submerged in a container of alcohol (usually about 40 percent) along with a selection of herbs and left for several days, after which the snake is removed, gutted, and returned to the bottle. Stutesman (2005, 205) provided a recipe for a Japanese Habu Sake cocktail—coil a specimen of habu (which may refer to one of several species of the vipers Trimeresurus or Ovophis) in a jar of sake and allow to “ferment” (actually, it would be preserved). By contrast, the recipe provided for the “snakebite” cocktail (Stutesman 2005, 206) does not contain any snake parts at all (shake together 4.5 oz Jack Daniels, 1.5 oz. Cointreau, and 1.5 oz. lime cordial and strain into a tall glass). At the Voodoo Museum in New Orleans, Louisiana, I observed specimens of Bufo marinus (cane toads) and Nerodia (water snakes) preserved in alcohol that is consumed in religious rituals.
Mescal is an alcoholic beverage that is distilled from the piña (the heart) of various types of agave or maguey plants, principally in the Oaxaca region of Mexico. The piña mash is cooked, sugars added, allowed to ferment, and then distilled twice to yield a mescal that is about 40 percent ethyl alcohol (80 proof). Following distillation, the mescal is aged in wooden barrels to give it color. Most people recognize mescal by the presence of the “worm,” which is the larva of either an agave snout weevil or agave moth, both of which are found in the piña after it is harvested. The tradition of adding the worm to mescal is thought to have its origin in providing proof of the alcohol content of the beverage.
The convergence of preservation and consumption has also found its way into popular song. The lyrics to the traditional songs Lightening Bar Blues (recorded by a number of artists, including Hoyt Axton on a 1970 album) and Rambling Boy (recorded by the Carter Family, the Del McCoury Band, and others) include a request to preserve the narrator’s bones in hundred proof alcohol rather than burying the body in a grave.
The Aesthetics of Fluid Preservation
Ever since Dr. Croone showed his “two embryos of puppy-dogs” before the Royal Society in 1662 (see chapter 1), the vast majority of fluid-preserved specimens have been prepared for scientific research, teaching, or museum exhibition, and fluid preservation has been largely a technical and scientific undertaking. Nevertheless, scientific specimens are part of cultural heritage as much as any other objects made or used by human beings. The practice of science is never purely objective—the questions that scientists ask and the ways in which they try to answer them are culturally determined, which means that scientific collections necessarily embody the beliefs and ideals of the cultures which preserve the specimens, creating an intersection of science and culture that has aesthetic value. As can be seen in this brief review of representations of fluid preservation in art, literature, film, and music, objects floating in jars of fluid can evoke our emotions, pique our curiosities, stimulate our imaginations, and represent our deepest fears and horrors.