Adipocere
Adipocere (
History
Adipocere was first described by
In a Hydropicall body ten years buried in a Church-yard, we met with a fat concretion, where the nitre of the Earth, and the salt and lixivious liquor of the body, had coagulated large lumps of fat, into the consistence of the hardest castile-soap: wherof part remaineth with us.
The chemical process of adipocere formation, saponification, came to be understood in the 17th century when microscopes became widely available.[3]
In 1825, physician and lecturer Augustus Granville is believed to have (somewhat unwittingly) made candles from the adipocere of a mummy and used them to light the public lecture he gave to report on the mummy's dissection. Granville apparently thought that the waxy material from which he made the candles had been used to preserve the mummy, rather than its being a product of the saponification of the mummified body.[4]
The body of the "Soap Lady", whose corpse turned itself into adipocere, is displayed in the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.[5]
Probably the most famous known case of adipocere is that of Scotland's Higgins brothers, murdered by their father in 1911 but whose bodies were not found until 1913. The bodies had been left floating in a flooded quarry, resulting in an almost complete transformation into adipocere. Pathologists Sydney Smith and Professor Littlejohn were able to find more than enough evidence from the preserved remains for police to identify the victims and charge the killer, who was hanged. At the same time, the pathologists secretly took some of the remains back to Edinburgh University for further study; nearly a century later, a relative requested the return of those remains so they could be given a Christian burial. The university agreed to do so if the claimant could prove her relationship to the boys and if other relatives agreed to her plan, and the remains were eventually cremated in 2009.[6][7]
Appearance
Adipocere is a crumbly, waxy, water-insoluble material consisting mostly of saturated fatty acids. Depending on whether it was formed from white or brown body fat, adipocere is either grayish white or tan in color.[3]
In corpses, the firm cast of adipocere allows some estimation of body shape and facial features, and injuries are often well-preserved.[3]
Formation
Adipocere is formed by the anaerobic bacterial
An exposed, insect-infested body or a body in a warm environment is unlikely to form deposits of adipocere.Corpses of women, infants and overweight persons are particularly prone to adipocere transformation because they contain more body fat.
The degradation of adipocere continues after exhumation at the microscopic level resulting from the combination of exposure to air, handling, dissection and the enzymatic activity of microbiota.[10]
See also
Footnotes
- ^ "Adipocere". Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary. Retrieved 23 January 2016.
- ^ "Adipocere". Lexico UK English Dictionary. Oxford University Press. Archived from the original on 21 December 2019.
- ^ ISBN 978-1-58765-423-7.
- ^ Pain, Stephanie (1 January 2009). "What killed Dr Granville's mummy?". New Scientist (2687).
- ^ "The Soap Lady". muttermuseum.org. Mütter Museum. Archived from the original on 24 March 2014. Retrieved 22 December 2021.
- ^ Rose, Gareth (9 January 2008). "Plea to university to return bodies of murder victims". The Scotsman. Archived from the original on 5 October 2015. Retrieved 22 December 2021.
- ^ "Murdered boys' final remains laid to rest". The Scotsman. 9 May 2009. Archived from the original on 9 July 2017. Retrieved 22 December 2021.
- ^ "Decomposition: What is grave wax?". Archived from the original on 15 February 2009. Retrieved 6 October 2011.
- S2CID 1452569.
- PMID 29669235.