Michael Kammen, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author who wrote “Digging Up the Dead: A History of Notable American Reburials” and professor emeritus of American History and Culture at Cornell University, comments on the exhumation of the remains of longtime Palestinian leader Yasar Arafat, and how the probe into the cause of his death fits into political history.
Kammen says:
“The politicization of reburials has been going on since antiquity.
“Exhuming the bodies of political leaders is a familiar story. Abraham Lincoln’s remains were moved multiple times, but mainly to secure him from potential grave robbers. Benito Mussolini was dug up secretly so that his corpse could be repatriated to Emilia-Romagna, his birthplace, and so that his fingers could be fetishized.
“Suspicion of poison is a very old story and difficult to prove. Twenty years after Napoleon died in 1821, he was exhumed for reburial in Paris. Tests were made and the arsenic found turned out to be in his wallpaper at St. Helena. U.S. President Zachary Taylor died in 1850 under bizarre circumstances. When he was dug up in 1991 and tested for arsenic, the tests concluded that the traces found were the levels known to exist in a normal body. Moreover, many popular preservatives used for embalming contain arsenic, which has always muddled the findings reached when a leader has been dug up.”
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