Vatican officials indicated that the procedure involved the injection of a formaldehyde-based fluid, which falls short of a full embalming process.
Dr. Giovanni Arcudi, the head of forensic medicine at Rome's Tor Vergata University, confirmed that he had been summoned to the Vatican after the pope's death Saturday night to oversee the body's temporary preservation -- but said he had been sworn to secrecy about the details....
Dr. Gennaro Goglia, who was among those who prepared John XXIII's body for burial in 1963, was pleased upon the exhumation to see how well his work had held up.
So was the Vatican, which awarded him a medal.
Now in his 80s, Goglia recalled with reverence his abrupt summons to the papal apartment, where he worked late into the night, attended by prayerful clerics. He saved for posterity the scalpel he used. ------------------------------
THE INCORRUPTIBLES By Heather Pringle Discover Magazine, Vol. 22 No. 6, June 2001;http://www.nhne.com/misc/incorruptibles.html: Over the last 15 years, however, a new view of the Incorruptibles has begun to emerge. At the Vatican's request, Italian pathologists, chemists, and radiologists have been poring over the bodies of the ancient men and women interred in church reliquaries. Charged with gleaning new information about the lives of the saints and assisting in the conservation of sacred remains, they have also brought science to the altars of Europe's cathedrals. Already, they have examined more than two dozen saints and beati, shedding light on the mystery of their preservation. While some saints were clearly mummified by their devout followers, others were protected from decay by environmental conditions, raising new questions about incorruptibility. "What is a miracle?" asks Ezio Fulcheri, a pathologist at the University of Genoa and one of the leading researchers on the Incorruptibles. "It's something unexplainable, a special event that may occur in different ways." The causes may seem mysterious "but don't exclude [rare] natural processes that are different from the normal course of things."
The 20th-century Catholic Church had not hesitated in calling on science for help in preserving a future saint. That sparked Fulcheri to wonder whether it had made similar appeals in ages past...
Fulcheri came across his first clues when Nolli called on his help once again, this time with an official examination of an important 13th-century Tuscan saint, Margaret of Cortona. ...
As Fulcheri gently lifted the hem of her dress up over her legs, all those assembled began to murmur. Several long incisions streaked along her thighs; other, deeper cuts ran along her abdomen and chest. Clearly made after death, they had been sewn shut with a whipstitch in coarse black thread. Saint Margaret had been artificially mummified. -
It goes on and it quite interesting,.
You would think that the Vatican would put more research dollars to hire the best scientist to examine the Shroud of Turin. It is the only artifact which piques the interest of scientists.