When Vladimir Lenin died in 1924, he wasn’t buried. Instead, his body was embalmed and placed inside a mausoleum in Moscow’s Red Square, where it remains on public display more than a century later. But this isn’t traditional embalming. Roughly every 18 months, a specialist team of scientists performs an intensive preservation procedure. The body is submerged in a chemical solution of glycerol, potassium acetate, alcohol, and formaldehyde to prevent decay. Because Lenin’s blood vessels were seve

In 1920, a grieving father in Sicily lost daughter to the Spanish flu just days before her second birthday. Her name was Rosalia Lombardo. Heartbroken and unable to accept her death, he turned to a skilled embalmer, Alfredo Salafia, asking him to preserve her body. What followed would become one of the most extraordinary cases of embalming in modern history. He injected a carefully balanced chemical formula, including formalin to kill bacteria, glycerin to prevent excessive drying, salicylic aci