[Age of Reason]

If I remember correctly, the body of Admiral Nelson was preserved in a cask of rum for the trip back from Trafalgar.

And I seem to remember crews in those days sneaking drinks from the barrel of other preserved corpes, in at least one case drinking the barrel dry.

[Pete from Shawnee Mission]

There was a written history of the town that I grew up in which cited a incident in which a resident, who was English, died and was shipped back to England for burial in a barrel of whiskey. (Not much rum in Illinois. They probably used sour mash bourbon..) When the cask arrived, it was empty, the sailors having drained it. This book was written in approximately 1940, so if this sort of thing is an urban legend, it was been circulating for quite some time. In this instance, I suspect it was real.

[Flavius Josephus]

I recently saw a program on the development of medicine that talked a lot about grave robbing for bodies to be used in the medical schools a couple hundred years ago. They said preserving them in whiskey or rum and then selling the rum when the body was taken out was quite commonplace. After all, it's sterile, right? Right?