2024-01-12 09:54:42
It is not Walt Disney but James Bedford, the first cryogenized patient in history, who curiously died one month and two days after the death of the pioneer of the American animation industry.
When Walt Disney died of a devastating lung cancer on December 15, 1966 at Saint Joseph’s Hospital in Burbank, the rumor began to circulate and soon became legend. It was said that his corpse had been frozen and was deposited in a secret place waiting to be revived when medicine had advanced enough to cure his illness and allow it to continue circulating among the living.
By infobae.com
The creator of Mickey Mouse was 65 years old and had been a chain smoker for almost his entire life, which had caused him to have cancer that quickly metastasized and against which not even cobalt therapy, the most advanced at the time, could Do nothing.
The rumor of the frozen body grew on a global scale without anyone opposing it with the slightest logical reasoning. It didn’t matter that the disease had devastated Disney’s body to the point that not a miracle – scientific or otherwise – could recover it, nor that never in the history of medicine had a corpse been frozen to revive it.
The story sounded as fascinating and hypnotic as the vision of the brooms that Disney himself had made dance to the tune of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Paul Dukas’ wonderful symphonic poem, to get Mickey into trouble.
But if the rumor was pure fantasy, there were two real facts that made it credible.
On the one hand, due to the family’s secrecy, almost no one found out that the body of the man who revolutionized cartoons had been cremated two days after his death and his ashes were buried in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park cemetery in Glendale, in California.
On the other hand, the idea of freezing recently deceased people to wait for medical treatments had begun to circulate in some scientific fields, proposed by an eccentric Physics professor at the University of Michigan, Dr. Robert Ettinger.
The technique he had devised was called cryogenization and – coincidentally or not – it would be used for the first time just one month and two days after Walt Disney’s death.
It happened on January 12, 1967, the day on which the foreseeable death of retired psychology professor James Bedford, 73, a victim of kidney cancer that had already taken his lungs, occurred.
Bedford was fascinated by the possibilities offered by Ettinger’s technique and although he knew that, due to his age and illness, if they “defrosted” him in the future they would hardly be able to cure him, he decided to volunteer and put his corpse at the service of science.
Thus Professor Bedford became the first cryogenized person in history, although legend continues to put Uncle Walt in that place.
In 1965, the first organization in the world dedicated to cryopreservation, the Life Extension Foundation (LES), wanted to promote its activities and offered to freeze a volunteer for free.
There were several, but in none of the cases could their bodies be used because, even though they had left their will in writing, the relatives opposed it.
Bedford’s situation was different: he had been married and had five children, but for reasons unknown, he lived in a nursing home and no one visited him.
Due to the progression of his illness, it was known that he would die soon, so Ettinger and his collaborators at the Cryonics Society of California, directed by Robert Nelson, were prepared.
Ettinger began a race against time: it was necessary to have everything ready for the exact moment the patient died. “We gathered the necessary equipment. I sent a cardiac compressor and a lung ventilation machine. “The Phoenix Freezing Material Company sent a special coffin insulated with plastic foam in which the patient would be temporarily packed in dry ice,” he later said in an interview published by the Spanish newspaper ABC.
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