Info sent to me by a friend:
An 1852 ad by W. C. Davis in Cincinnati's Daily Non-Pareil announced recently made arrangements with the Patentee of this new and valuable invention for the manufacture and sale of the article in the west, they having been manufactured heretofore exclusively in the east, (where they are superseding the use of wood coffins)... This invention now coming into general use is pronounced one of the greatest of the age.
The "Queen City of the West" was soon at the center of this development. Cincinnati stove- and hollow-ware manufacturers Crane, Breed & Co. purchased the Fisk Metallic Burial Case Company in 1853 and quickly began large-scale production.
These metal "cases" not only redefined the terminology of dead body containers away from the harsh connotations of "coffins," but also reflected a new departure in the valuation ! of the individual, material self. An 1857 novel entitled Agnes and the Key to her Little Coffin explained that:
Their shape is not in seeming mockery of the rigid, swathed body; the broken angles and lines of the old coffin are drawn in continuous lines; they look like other things, and not like that which looks like nothing else, a coffin; you would be willing to have such a shape for the depository of any household article.
From the luxurious silk lining materials to the cases' individualized nameplates to a new system of locks and keys replacing the "remorseless screws and screwdriver," everything about the new cases bespoke a transformation the treatment! of corpses. With their metallic composition, mummy-style shape, and "eighteen different sizes... varying in length from 22 inches to 6 1/2 feet," such burial cases preserved and glorified the body lain inside.
Fisk's Metallic burial cases were similarly marketed in Connecticut in 1850: the manufacturer claimed to they were optimum devices for "preserving in the most secure and appropriate manner, the remains of the dead from sudden decay, from water, from vermin and from the ravages of tee [sic] dissecting knife."
Certainly people in Cincinnati had similar concerns. With more medical schools than any other city in the West, as well as a notorious bodysnatcher named "Old Cuny" purveying his services in the area, the concern was both near and real. Six medical schools in the area offered practical anatomy, including not only "alternative" schools such as the Eclectic College but also dental schools such as the Ohio College. Advertisements for these institutions prominently claimed "well supplied" anatomical cabinets, promising that "students may rely on a fully supply of materiel throughout the session." With insufficient laws for obtaining such material legally, antebellum Americans knew that the bodies! of th! eir loved ones risked both theft and mutilation, as bodysnatchers sought to ensure that the identify of the victim would not be known. From all such evidence, one might wonder whether the efflorescence of metal caskets and medical schools in Cincinnati were more than indirectly related. We see similar expressions of concern in the thirteen communities revolted against medical schools from 1824 to 1854, including four in Ohio and two in Illinois. Such crowd actions demonstrate that medical science afforded an important consideration to both nineteenth-century Americans and the undertakers entrusted to care for dead bodies.
