67 years after James Bedford’s cryogenization, the man who remains frozen today is waiting to be revived.

When Walt Disney died of devastating lung cancer on December 15, 1966 at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Burbank Rumors began to spread and soon became legends.. It was said that his corpse was frozen and deposited in a secret location awaiting reanimation while the drug cured his illness and allowed him to roam among the living.

via infobae.com

The creator of Mickey Mouse was 65 years old and had been a chain smoker for almost his entire life, which gave him cancer that quickly metastasized and against which even the most advanced cobalt therapy at the time could do nothing.

The frozen body rumor grew globally without anyone contradicting it with the slightest logical reasoning. It didn’t matter that the disease had ravaged Disney’s body to such an extent that no miracle—scientific or otherwise—could restore it, that never in the history of medicine had a corpse been frozen to revive it.

The story seemed as charming and hypnotic as the vision of the brooms that Disney himself danced. Sorcerer’s ApprenticeA wonderful tone poem by Paul Dukas, to get Mickey in trouble.

But if the rumor was pure fiction, there were two real facts that made it credible.

On the one hand, due to family secrecy, almost no one knew that the cartoon revolutionary’s body was cremated two days after his death and his ashes were buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California. .

On the other hand, the idea of ​​freezing the recently dead to wait for medical treatment began to circulate in some scientific circles, led by eccentric physics professor at the University of Michigan, Dr. Proposed by Robert Ettinger.

The technique he 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 retired psychology professor James Bedford, 73, suffered a near death from kidney cancer that had already taken his lungs.

Bedford was intrigued by the possibilities offered by Ettinger’s technique and although he knew that, due to his age and illness, he was unlikely to be able to cure him if he “defrosted” him in the future, he decided. Become a volunteer and put your corpse at the service of science.

Professor Bedford thus became the first cryogenized person in history, although legend continues to place Uncle Walt in that position.

In 1965, the Life Extension Foundation (LES), the world’s first organization dedicated to cryopreservation, wanted to promote its activities and offered to freeze volunteers for free.

There were many, but in no case could their bodies be used because, even though they had left their wishes in writing, the relatives opposed it.

Bedford’s position was different: He was married and had five children, but for unknown reasons, he lived in a nursing home and no one visited him..

Because of the progress of his illness, it was known that he would soon die, so Ettinger and his colleagues at the Cryonics Society of California, directed by Robert Nelson, prepared.

Ettinger began a race against time: everything had to be ready for the precise moment of the patient’s death. “We collected the necessary equipment. I sent cardiac compressor and 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 said in an interview later published by a Spanish newspaper. ABC.

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