The table is a peeling wooden door, laid flat across two upright barrels. The deceased is a bearded young man, his lips and eyelids already blue, bare feet extending beyond the white sheet covering most of the corpse. And hand-pumping chemicals into the body is Dr. Richard Burr, a 19th-century U.S. Army surgeon who found opportunity in the flourishing practice of embalming fallen Civil War soldiers.

The exhibit is the latest addition to the National Museum of Civil War Medicine, a permanent installation of photographs, artifacts and life-size mannequins documenting America's embrace of full-body preservation.

"It's just gruesome enough to get the point across of how serious this was, but we've downplayed the goriness enough to not have people run away in revulsion," said George Wunderlich, the museum's executive director.

Embalming dates to ancient Egypt but it wasn't widely used in the United States until the Civil War, to preserve soldiers' remains for shipment home.

Before then, chemical preservation of human tissue was used mainly for specimens, said Terry Reimer, the museum's research director. When someone died, undertakers tried to keep the body chilled to slow decay until burial. Refrigerated coffins, with ice chambers on top and drainage systems below, could be rented for viewings.

Civil War battles killed huge numbers of men, many from places far from the battlefields. Some surgeons and pharmacists familiar with tissue preservation became embalmers, following the troops and offering, for fees of up to $100, to prepare bodies for the long journey home. Corpses that were not preserved could not legally be shipped.

James W. Lowry, author of the book, "Embalming Surgeons of the Civil War," said most of the 529,000 soldiers killed in the war were simply buried near where they died, often wrapped in a blanket. The 10,000 to 40,000 who were embalmed were largely officers, he said.

"After one of these large battles, the embalming surgeons, once they got to the battlefield, would go out and bring the bodies of the officers in," said Lowry, a Charleston, W.Va., funeral director. Since officers generally came from wealthier families, "they knew if they embalmed them, they'd get paid."

The embalmers often prepared the bodies immediately, before contacting the families, he said. Reimer said some pharmacists stored embalmed bodies by standing them up against a wall. One, in Washington, D.C., displayed a uniformed corpse in a window for several days, she said.

Burr, a Philadelphia physician, served briefly with the 72nd Pennsylvania Infantry before becoming an embalmer. According to Reimer and Lowry, he was notorious for price-gouging. Burr also had a sideline of selling and reselling the same grave marker for soldiers buried locally, Lowry said.

The museum exhibit in downtown Frederick recreates a photograph of Burr demonstrating the procedure. A black rubber tube runs from a canister of preservative _ perhaps arsenic or creosote, since formaldehyde hadn't been discovered yet _ into an artery in the subject's right armpit.

Reimer said Civil War embalmers didn't drain their subjects _ many had bled out the battlefield, anyway _ and they didn't deal with the abdominal cavity. They simply pumped a quart of preservative into an artery and moved on.

One embalming surgeon, Dr. Thomas Holmes, claimed to have embalmed 4,028 bodies during the four-year war, Lowry said.

On the wall hangs one of Burr's advertisements, a handbill printed in Frederick in October 1862, when the city was filled with dying soldiers wounded in the nearby battles of Antietam and South Mountain.

"Embalming the Dead," reads the poster, which is reproduced on T-shirts and mugs available in the gift shop. The copy invites the curious to watch the procedure, which, in the photograph, is being done outside a tent.

The seven-year-old museum is the only one in the country dedicated to the medical side of the Civil War, which also produced advancements in anesthesia, nursing, ambulances and mobile hospitals.

The embalming display is around the corner from an apothecary wagon and is the last thing one sees before exiting the exhibits.

Some students in a group of eighth graders on a recent tour avoided looking at the display, but Elaine English, one of their chaperones, couldn't forget it.

"I'm sure I'll see it tonight in my dreams," she said.

National Museum of Civil War Medicine: http://www.civilwarmed.org

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