There are two things that stick out at me from my time in mortuary school.

1) There is ALWAYS a cause and manner of death. There is no such thing as "unexplained or unknown causes." If there is some level of doubt, a post mortem or autopsy is performed to get to the bottom of it. Autopsy means "to see with one's own eyes" or "to see for yourself."

2) My embalming teacher used to brag that he could embalm any body. It might not look good or be presentable, but he could at least get it embalmed. Once, he used a chicken egg to demonstrate to our class how formalin fixes the protein of the yolk. He literally embalmed a chicken egg. He died several years ago, but at the time, when he said he could embalm anything, he was referring to indigents that were dead and unclaimed for 30 days (these bodies were then donated to our school for embalming practice). While these bodies were refrigerated, they were in extremely poor condition for being dead for so long (even under refrigeration and if you could remove all bacteria and fungi, the body will still decompose because every cell has autolytic enzymes). We were told that if we could embalm those bodies, then "normal" cases would be a cakewalk. I seriously wonder if he was still alive today, if he'd still be able to make that claim that he can "embalm any body."

BTW...I'm well aware people on here will say I'm LARPing. I don't really are if you don't believe me or not.