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05/07/2012 08:17 AM

Funerals Are Different These Days

“Science and technology also removed some of the mystery from death. Before the Civil War, embalming was viewed as a gruesome mutilation of the body. Only dead soldiers were embalmed in order to preserve the bodies for shipping back home.

President Abraham Lincoln was the first fully embalmed person put on display in American history, and his traveling funeral train provided a public viewing of death for thousands of people.” from here

Read more: Anniston Star - Joyful sorrow Funerals are no longer somber affairs

04/09/2012 08:13 AM

Mike Wallace

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03/18/2012 09:05 AM

Modern Embalming: a talk given at Threshold Care Circle, March 17, 2012, Landmark Center, Viroqua, Wis.

MODERN EMBALMING

by John H. Sime

Modern embalming goes back to the work of an apothecary’s assistant in France serving in the army of Napoleon.  Jean Gannal devised a method of preserving cadavers used for anatomical research. He later made his services available to the general public.

Prior to the American Civil War, his techniques had arrived in the United States through the translation of Gannal’s book “The History of Embalming” by Dr. Richard Harlan.  Again, the techniques were initially used as a means of preserving anatomical cadavers and later made their way into use for the general public. The Civil War provided the impetus for embalming to spread throughout the country as for the first time large numbers of men were dying far from home and families wished to have them returned home for viewing and burial.  President Lincoln and his son Willie were both embalmed.

For many years, “natural” versus “artificial” embalming competed for the market in the USA.  Natural embalming involved displaying the body in metal caskets that were not used for burial.  There were instead tanks that were made to resemble caskets which could be filled with ice.  This was standard water ice, not dry ice.   The body would then be laid upon the ice and could then be preserved for the two or three days required for the typical funeral procedure.  At the time of burial, the body was taken out of the casket and buried in a standard wooden casket usually made in the vicinity, perhaps by the undertaker. The metal casket had a spigot which could be opened to let the melted ice and water drain out for the next usage.

Artificial embalming required the  presence of chemical companies  to produce the embalming chemicals needed to preserve the bodies in the manner outlined by Jean Gannal and others.  It also required knowledge of the circulatory system, which had first been discovered by Dr. William Harvey in 17th century England. Until that time people had not realized that arteries carry blood from the heart and lungs to the organs and that the veins carry the blood from the organs back to the heart and lungs.  It had been thought by some doctors that the arteries carried air throughout the body because blood is not usually found in the arteries at the time of death.

Jean Gannal realized that a preservative could be injected into the arteries and carried throughout the body, with the blood being drained via the veins. This is the essence of modern arterial embalming, which is a far more effective preservation method than previous methods, such as long term soaking of the body in salt water or natron solution as used by the Egyptians, and such as hypodermic injection of preservatives throughout the body. It not only effectively distributes the preservative, but also removes the blood which is the primary vector of the decomposition process.

Various preservatives were tried over the years. Jean Gannal used aluminum acetate and chloride. Dr. Thomas Holmes, who is credited with being the primary advocate of arterial embalming in the USA, particularly during the Civil War, used zinc chloride and arsenic. By the end of the 19th century formaldehyde had been developed as a preservative. Eventually legislation was passed banning the use of arsenic and other heavy metals for embalming largely for medico-legal reasons.

By the turn of the 19th/20th centuries, states began to legislate on other aspects of embalming.  For the first time it was required that embalmers receive some sort of education in the embalming process itself.  Initially, as there were no colleges or universities which taught such courses, this type of instruction was done in seminars performed by chemical companies. Would be funeral directors would travel to some large city and learn about embalming, embalming fluid, and anatomy in a course lasting a week or two and then return home with a supply of embalming chemicals and instruments. Gradually, the seminars were lengthened into a month, and finally schools were established to teach the subjects on a permanent basis. The first such school was in Denver, Colo. , the second was in Louisville, Ky. (of which I was a graduate in 1980).  Today there are about twenty funeral education programs in colleges and universities throughout the nation.

Embalming was at first done in the home. The chemicals were transported to the home and the blood drained from the body was collected and transported back to town for disposal. Moreover, as many funerals were also in the home, the funeral director also transported chairs, draperies, and the casket to the home.  As the twentieth century progressed this work was gradually moved to facilities set up by the funeral director at his place of business. These places were variously called mortuaries or funeral parlors or funeral homes.

Oscar Anderson was the man who founded the funeral home I now own and operate in Readstown.  He was a cousin of my father, Henry Sime. Oscar hired my father and my uncle Harlan Sime to work for him in the funeral home doing odd jobs. Eventually, both of them became funeral directors and purchased the business when Oscar died in the late 1940s. Oscar moved to Readstown in 1905 and set up a furniture business. It is not long before his advertisement in the Readstown Herald contains a line “Caskets Available”.  Gradually this progresses to “Undertaking Services Provided”, and later to “Oscar Anderson-Funeral Director and Embalmer”.  He journeyed to first Chicago to take a short embalming seminar, and later to Valparaiso, Indiana where he took a longer course at Valparaiso University. For many years his funerals and visitations were conducted in the homes and in churches, until the 1920s when he purchased the first of two large homes which he converted into funeral homes.

Like most funeral directors and embalmers of his era, Oscar first used the gravity method to inject the embalming fluid into the body.  A bottle of embalming fluid is suspended over the body and the force of gravity will gradually replace the blood in the circulatory system with the embalming fluid.  Eventually, pump devices were invented which can inject the fluid into the body mechanically using water pressure. The first embalming machine installed at our establishment was brought to Readstown by Oscar’s son in law, Art Terhune, who had purchased it while attending embalming school in Milwaukee.  Oscar protested the procedure from the start, exclaiming repeatedly: “You are going to blow the body up!”.  However, when he saw the finished results, and was pleased, he simply said in this thick Norwegian brogue: “From now on you embalm all the bodies around here with that thing there!”.

By the time I received my license in 1980, I was the eighth member of my family to work as a funeral director in our firm.  That does not include numerous wives, sisters, brothers, in-laws, cousins, and girl friends who were drafted to help move caskets, pick up bodies, fix hair, and dress bodies.

03/17/2012 04:44 PM

CHILD BEREAVEMENT PROGRAMS IN WISCONSIN

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for CHILD BEREAVEMENT PROGRAMS IN WISCONSIN

from the Wisconsin Department of Justice

02/14/2012 08:29 AM

Readstown Chili Supper

Peace Lutheran Church

Wednesday, Feb. 15, 2012–4 to 7 PM

Proceeds to the Readstown Museum

01/31/2012 08:41 AM

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“… almost four years after the last devastating flood from the swollen Kickapoo River, the Uplands of Gays Mills, as some refer to it, is taking shape on the east and west sides of Highway 131 about a mile north of the original downtown.”

12/31/2011 08:09 AM

WDRT in State Journal

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” WDRT-FM (91.9) has been on the air for just over a year but has quickly become a part of the cultural fabric of this region known for its artisans, organic farmers and independent spirit.”

10/08/2011 03:02 PM

Rice Spann in the Peace Corps

Rice Spann in the Peace Corps

by John H. Sime

Rice Spann comes from the rolling farm country of Lebanon, New Jersey. Yes, there is such a world, beyond the urban and suburban New Jersey we see on television and the movies. In fact it is not that much different from around here, and Rice’s childhood was full of adventures in hayfields and on country lanes just like we enjoy.

He was an economics major at Merrimack College in North Andover, Massachusetts when he took a course on development and foreign aid.  At the same time he encountered an issue of the National Geographic for the month and year of his birth. There was an article about the return of the first Peace Corps volunteers from Africa.  Things like this got him to thinking about going through the complex process of joining the Peace Corps.

As is the case with so many returned Peace Corps volunteers he has very little good to say about the application process.  It was a lengthy encounter with both humiliation and incompetence. And if you don’t like it there’s the door. However, as soon as he finally made contact with the right person in the Peace Corps bureaucracy everything changed for the better. He finally called the man on the Honduras desk for Peace Corps and soon found himself enroute to that country as a group of water specialists.

In Miami he met a group of 15 water and well sanitation engineers, all the members of this group were male.  They were trained with  a group of about 30 aqua-culture (fish) experts who called themselves the “fish heads”.  Once in Honduras, they went through a 4 1/2 month training process.  Each day all the trainees, or “aspirantes” as they were called, had four hours of Spanish language training and  several hours each day of training in their job skill–in Rice’s case this was water sanitation. The head trainer was an outgoing volunteer who had a sort of  drill sergeant like demeanor. About five of the original fifteen water specialists dropped out largely because of his toughness. Fortunately, Rice was not one of them.   They learned about hydrology, latrine technology, and the techniques of working with concrete.

Rice lived in Lapeara, a city of 4,000 in the province of Lampira in the coffee growing mountain regions of south western Honduras. Founded in the 1530s, the downtown of Lapaera has an old Catholic church with an inscription dated 1640. This Viroqua sized city is surrounded by several “aldeas” or villages which involved much of the rural population. Rice would journey to these aldeas on a regular basis to help do water projects using a combination of local resources and labor, and outside resources and organization. He worked with a well known NGO-(non governmental organization) called Foster Parent Plan, in which money would be raised ostensibly for the support of third world children, but actually it was for the children as well as development projects such as well, water systems, and schools that the children could use.

Rice and his fellow water sanitation specialists worked on dozens of projects.  Local organizations were formed in each aldea to facilitate the process and to maintain the project in coming years.  They were very successful in this part of the plan, but less so in the hoped for later phase in which the aldeas would set up fee structures to financially sustain the projects.  Nevertheless, thousands of people benefited from the basic work that was done.

Rice left Honduras in 1994. After that he was a school teacher of 3d and 4th grade Spanish in Texas.  He has been in the Driftless area since 2005. He and his wife (Jennifer) have a farm outside of Westby.  She works for the Westby School system. They are in the house building mode at the moment.

His group has had no real reunions, except for the fact that a couple of weddings have brought some of this fellow water trainees together.

09/05/2011 07:45 AM

Labor Day Celebration in Readstown

Sept. 3-5, 2011

08/15/2011 08:14 AM

John Sime in the Peace Corps–Celebrating 50 Years of Peace Corps.

by Kaela Firebaugh

John H. Sime joined the Peace Corps in 1976.  He was sent to the West African nation of Mali as a teacher.

Born in Viroqua in 1952, and raised in Readstown, John graduated from Kickapoo High School in 1970.  He then received a BA in 1974 and MA in 1976 in Comparative Literature from UW Madison.  In addition to literature, he studied Spanish, French and German languages.  After completing his Master’s degree, John was ready for a break from academic life but was not quite ready to return to Readstown to take over the family business.  After looking into various work and travel options, he decided to try applying to the Peace Corps.  The Peace Corps was impressed with his linguistic abilities and suggested he apply as a teacher of English as a foreign language (TEFL).  There were several possible positions available, but John was intrigued by the possibility of going to Mali.  He had always heard of the ancient city of Timbuktu (in Mali) and read about the long and interesting history of the country.  He applied and went through medical clearance and was sent to Atlanta for four days of training before flying off to Mali with a group of twenty five other volunteers.

Once in Mali, John lived in the capital city of Bamako.  Although the city was crowded, and Mali is a poor country, there was little crime and John felt safe living in a rented house on a busy street.  John enjoyed few amenities in Bamako. There was electricity only part of the time. He had cold but not hot running water and no phone service or air conditioning.  Fortunately, there were street vendors and restaurants that supplied ready access to good, inexpensive food. 

There were many cultural challenges. Evidence of extreme poverty, disease and physical deformity greeted him every day on the streets of Bamako.  Although French colonial rule of Mali ended in 1960, the official language of the country is French.  Ninety percent of the population is Islamic. John definitely stood out as a white American and people (especially young children) on the street would stare or call out to him–calling him “toubabou” or stranger.

The first president elected in Mali after independence from the French was a socialist named Modibo Keita.  He established a one party state, nationalized most of the natural resource production, and forged close ties to the then eastern block communist countries.  During the 1970’s while John was a volunteer, Mali was ruled by a military-backed president, Moussa Traore who had overthrown Modibo Keita in a bloodless coup in 1968.  Although he instituted some changes in an attempt to improve the economy and living conditions, a devastating drought and famine from 1968 to 1974 hampered any progress.  His rule was marked by increasing social unrest and student strikes and there was even a failed coup attempt against him while John was living there.  There was little freedom of speech or press and John was told specifically not to criticize the government or culture of Mali in his teaching or writing while there.

John worked at a teacher’s college called Ecole Normale Superièure (Advanced Normal School).  In the cold war style of the time, the school was funded and built by the Soviet Union but had an addition that was funded and built by the United States.  The Soviet part of the building was replete with busts of Lenin.  The head of the English Department at the school was British, although all official school meetings were held in French.  The style of teaching there was very different than in the U.S. in that teachers were told to “teach to the best” and literally weed out weaker students.  Anyone below the mean or in the lower half of the class received a failing grade.

Rather than only teaching English as he had expected, John was assigned to train high school teachers.  The classes he taught included African Literature, English Literature, and English Grammar and Oral Comprehension.  Classes were held each morning and then John worked in the school library in the afternoon.  He especially enjoyed getting to know his students and figuring out what topics interested them the most and would inspire them to speak up in class.  Together they read and discussed novels and had discussions on current events.  Students particularly liked to discuss feminism and African popular music.  Although students could speak French, English and several local languages, the classes were conducted in English.  John also was required to visit and critique students as they were “practice teaching.” He also advised students on writing their senior thesis and was part of a three teacher “jury” that decided the final grades for each student’s thesis.

Upon completing his two year assignment, John did some traveling in Europe and then returned home.  After attending mortuary school in Kentucky in 1979-1980, he joined and eventually took over the family business: Sime Funeral Home.  Inspired by his library work in Mali, John started a library in Readstown.  He also became involved in the Readstown Historical Society.  He continues to live and work in Readstown with his wife Jan.

Over the years, John has kept in touch with and participated in reunions with other returned volunteers from his group.  In 2003, John took a trip back to Mali to see how things have changed and to visit areas of the country he had wanted to see years earlier.  He toured parts of the northern desert by camel and visited the ancient cities of Djenne and Timbuktu.  He returned to his old school and Peace Corps office.  He even met some of the Peace Corps volunteers that were serving at that time and learned about their efforts at water sanitation and social work.

John found that Bamako the capital has developed and grown tremendously.  The drafting of a new constitution in 1991 has created a democratic multi-party state in Mali and established a much more free press and media.  Also the advent of cell phones and computers has opened up new opportunities and greatly changed the way people communicate and do business.

John continues to follow the many changes taking place politically and socially in Mali.  Although still mired in poverty, the country is currently enjoying a period of stability and growth that bodes well for the future.