Brooklyn Brainery

Embalming received another boost four years later, when Abe Lincoln’s embalmed body traveled from Washington to his hometown in Illinois. The train ride amounted to a promotional tour for funerary embalming, for wherever the train stopped, people came to view him, and more than a few must have noted that he looked a whole lot better in his casket than Grandma had looked in hers. Word spread and the practice grew, like a chicken heart, and soon the whole nation was sending their decedents in to be posed and preserved.