Going Out with a Bang

This is from Over Your Dead Body, my book about how we deal with death, how it became a multi-million dollar industry, and the history & future of how we deal with death (order from the US here).
In it I mention the problem of exploding bodies at ceremonial funerals, a not-uncommon result of poor understanding of the science involved in embalming, or until the advent of the arterial method, more accurately pickling:

"The method the Russians have used on Lenin, Stalin, Ho Chi Minh, and other personalities whose cult needed extending, along with the variant used for Eva Peron, is the Rolls Royce of modern embalming treatments. Although done in the service of totalitarian political regimes, it’s actually a continuation of the traditions for royal or state funerals dating from medieval times, when the body needed to lie in state for some time, and perhaps go on a farewell tour round the country.

This was originally performed by monks, the ones who normally did the butchering for the abbey. Methods varied, as did the effectiveness of the results, but best practice involved removing the soft organs, washing out the blood and body fluids, and using a pickling solution.

We can presume the pickling solution was made by the monks working in the kitchen (refectory?), using skills they had learnt preserving food. Typical ingredients include wine, vinegar or spirits, pickling salts and herbs and spices.

When it works, pickling can work very well indeed. A scientific study found nitrite pickling salts and alcohol were better than formaldehyde for embalming (Nitrite pickling salt as an alternative to formaldehyde for embalming in veterinary anatomy--A study based on histo- and microbiological analyses, Janczyk, P et al, 2011).

The science goes like this (but because the monks didn’t understand the science, their results were hit and miss, and the misses could miss by a very large margin, as we shall see):

Pickling salts in the right concentration could remove water from the body by osmosis: if the pickle is more concentrated than the solution inside the body tissues, there would be a gradient across the cell walls, and just as gravity tends to make things on gradients level off, osmosis would make water move out of the cells to dilute the stronger solution outside the body. (Osmosis means freshwater fish never stop pissing because they need to get rid of all the water that comes into their bloodstreams through their gills, blood being thicker than water.)

Dehydrating the body kills the bacteria that cause decomposition.

The pickle gets into the body by diffusion, which works in the other direction to osmosis: because the solution in the cells is less concentrated, molecules of pickle move across a concentration gradient to where it’s less crowded on the other side of the skin and tissue cellwalls.

The pickle is too acid for the bacteria to live in, and ethanol (alcohol) is poisonous, as are chemicals in the herbs and spices."

Failure to understand what they were up to led to a premature and unwelcome climax to the proceedings on a number of occasions, the first recorded being at the funeral of William the Conqueror, king of England and France, in 1087. 

The last was, incredibly, in 1958. 

Pope Pius XII didn't want his body messed about with, so there was no post mortem and no arterial embalming. Instead, he arranged beforehand with his doctor that he would do it, using a technique supposed to be identical with that used for Jesus, invented (and so far untested) by a Professor Nuzzi, an embalmer from Naples. Dr Galeazzi-Lisi wasn't himself qualified as an embalmer, and, from the results, Professor Nuzzi's qualifications weren't worth much either. 

The procedure involved putting the body in a big plastic bag with herbs, aromatic oils and spices: boil-in-the-bag pontiff. 

Unfortunately, the weather was unusually hot, even for a Roman summer, and since there was no refrigeration involved, it turned out to be not far off actual boil-in-the-bag (and yes, the papal flesh really did 'simply fall off the bone'). And Jesus wasn't dead as long as Pope Pius was before his funeral. 

The result was that gases produced by anaerobic putrefaction caused the body to explode  in its coffin while lying in state at St John Lateran cathedral, only four days after Pius' death, growth of the anaerobic ('without oxygen') bacteria having been promoted by the sealed plastic bag.