Who is this?

One of the aspects of life (well, its end actually) that can be taken for granted is how things proceed after we take our final breath. For the record, burial is by no means the sole option: we live in a city with a medical college which welcomes body donations to help train future doctors in human anatomy.

But burial is by far the most common option, and the man above could be called the creator of the modern funeral industry. Thanks to his innovations, undertakers became morticians and funeral directors; buried became interred; graveyards turned into memorial parks, and funerals were transformed into memorial services

It all came to pass because our hero of the week, Thomas Holmes (1817-1900), did one basic thing: he brought embalming into modern times (modern as in, not the ancient Egyptians, who are still famed for their skill in preserving the human body after death).

Born in Brooklyn in 1817, Holmes graduated from the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University in 1845. During studies there, just like med students today, he was trained using cadavers. Holmes noticed that preservatives used at the time, including arsenic and mercury, were hazardous to the students’ health. He had the opportunity to examine some Egyptian mummies and realized that embalming could be done effectively without hazardous chemicals.

Holmes experimented with various preservatives, including creosote and turpentine, before finding a safe and effective formula which he sold to physicians and embalmers for $3 a gallon. Fortuitously (for Holmes), the Civil War was about to erupt, providing him with a huge supply of customers. He emerged from the war a wealthy man almost by coincidence.

The very first Union officer killed during the Civil War, 24-year-old Elmer Ellsworth, was a personal friend of Abraham Lincoln. The president was informed, and an honor guard brought Ellsworth’s body from nearby Alexandria, Virginia, to the White House where Lincoln directed that it lie in state before being transported to Ellsworth’s family in New York. Holmes had been appointed a captain in the Union Army Medical Corps stationed in Washington. He offered to embalm Col. Ellsworth at no cost inasmuch as the service was not connected in any way with Holmes’ military duties.

The freebie was well worth it: Ellsworth’s “lifelike” appearance impressed many, and Lincoln commissioned Holmes to train embalming surgeons so that Union soldiers killed in action could be preserved before being shipped back to their families for burial. Separately from that, Holmes personally contracted with the Army to embalm war dead, which he did for a fee of $100 each. Holmes claimed to have personally embalmed 4,028 fallen Union officers and soldiers.

In the post-war period Holmes opened shop in New York City where he sold embalming supplies, including a device his ads stated “surpasses all other inventions for filling the blood vessels of dead bodies.” His home in Brooklyn was said to be full of examples of his handiwork on display, including preserved heads. Curiously, he left specific directions that he was not to be embalmed upon his death. +

Most of us are no stranger to gastrointestinal ills of one sort or another. An estimated 70 million Americans suffer from one digestive malady or another every year, resulting in millions of hospitalizations, tens of millions of doctor visits, hundreds of thousands of deaths (236,000 is the actual estimated number), and $142 billion taken out of our collective pockets in direct and indirect costs.

As if all of that isn’t bad enough, the woods are crawling with pseudocures. Sometimess we’re in such misery that even a far-fetched “cure” is worth a shot, but no relief results. And what we’ll call gastromythology doesn’t help either: when we based digestive decisions on misinformation, it’s not going to help anything.

For example, fiber is good. Everybody knows that, right? So obviously the more fiber the better.

Well, most of us have a hard enough time getting anywhere close to the recommended 25 grams of fiber we should consume each day, but there are proponents of going above and beyond. That’s not a great idea for someone with a digestive issue like irritable bowel syndrome. And according to the British Medical Journal, the type of fiber consumed (soluble versus insoluble) can result in either more or fewer gastro symptoms. Bottom line: stick with the standard recommendations unless your doctor gives the green light to change.

Another pervasive myth is the colon cleanse/colon detox one. Commercials show depictions of colon walls lined with thick layers of residue — pounds of it — just waiting to be removed by the latest cleansing drink, or by someone at a cleansing spa. The need for these products and service is highly questionable. Again, check with your doctor before forking over your hard-earned money on such interventions. Have you heard that you should avoid popcorn, nuts, seeds and corn if you have diverticulitis? It’s a condition in which pockets in the intestines become inflamed and irritated. A study published in JAMA involving 47,000 men aged 40 to 75 years and followed for 18 years examined whether their dietary habits increased their risk of diverticulitis. The study’s conclusion: “Nut, corn, and popcorn consumption did not increase the risk of diverticulosis or diverticular complications. The recommendation to avoid these foods to prevent diverticular complications should be reconsidered.” As a professor of gastroenterology put it, a low fiber diet is the real culprit in diverticulitis, not nuts and seeds.

These are just a few myths surrounding digestive health, and they can be tough to shake; we may have heard them our entire lives. Maybe they’ve been handed down in our family for generations.

But it pays to check in with our doctor about some alleged digestive remedies. Wgat we think is a fact might be nothing more than a gut feeling. +