author

Charles H. Clarke

Best known for a practical early-20th-century guide to embalming, this writer drew on firsthand experience and the methods of many working embalmers. His surviving record is slim, which gives his book an old-school, from-the-trade feel.

1 Audiobook

History of Company F, 1st Regiment, R.I. Volunteers, during the Spring and Summer of 1861

History of Company F, 1st Regiment, R.I. Volunteers, during the Spring and Summer of 1861

by Charles H. Clarke

About the author

Charles H. Clarke is credited as the author of Practical Embalming: A Recitation of Actual Experiences of the Author and Hundreds of the Most Expert Embalmers of the World, a 1917 work on embalming and funeral practice. Some catalogs list him more fully as Charles Horace Clarke.

The book's title suggests the kind of writer he was: not a distant theorist, but someone interested in practical methods, case-based experience, and the day-to-day craft of embalming. That makes his work especially useful as a snapshot of how the profession explained itself in the early 1900s.

Reliable biographical details about his personal life appear to be scarce in the sources available online, so it is safest to remember him primarily through this book and its place in the history of mortuary practice.