Adipocere

Adipocere (), also known as corpse wax, grave wax or mortuary wax, is a wax-like organic substance formed by the anaerobic bacterial hydrolysis of fat in tissue, such as body fat in corpses. In its formation, putrefaction is replaced by a permanent firm cast of fatty tissues, internal organs, and the face.

History

Adipocere was first described by Sir Thomas Browne in his discourse Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial (1658):

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.

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.

The body of the "Soap Lady", whose corpse turned into adipocere, is displayed in the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

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.