Cryo-Care Equipment Corporation
CryoCare Equipment Corporation is a now-defunct Cryonics provider.
History
Cryo-Care did not use cryoprotectants or perfusion with their patients but only did straight freezes to liquid nitrogen temperature. These freezings were advertised as being for cosmetic purposes rather than eventual reanimation, though the cryonics issue did naturally arise. Their first case, in April 1966, was the first instance of a human being frozen with at least some thought of the cryonics premise of eventual reanimation, though conditions were adverse and prospects discouraging, as was admitted. The patient, a still-unidentified, middle-aged woman from the Los Angeles area, was placed in liquid nitrogen some two months after being embalmed and stored at slightly above-freezing temperature in a mortuary refrigerator. Within a year she was thawed and buried by relatives [3]. But Cryo-Care would also store a person suspended elsewhere, as they did with James Bedford, who was frozen in January 1967 by Nelson’s newly-formed organization and transferred by relatives. (Frozen quickly after death without embalming, with at least a crude attempt at cryoprotection by injections of perfusate and external heart massage, Bedford is often regarded as the first true cryonics case. Bedford also is still frozen today, unlike all the others frozen before 1974.)
Cryo-Care president Ed Hope was a wigmaker whose main interest in human freezing was financial. After some two years in the freezing business he saw it wasn’t going to turn a profit and opted out, turning any remaining patients over to other organizations or to relatives. One individual who had been briefly stored by him was Eva Schulman who was autopsied prior to being frozen early in 1968, and whose son hauled her around in a truck for a time, on dry ice. (Dry ice—solid carbon dioxide—is a far colder coolant than water ice but considerably warmer than liquid nitrogen which is commonly used for long-term storage of cryogenic specimens.) She was soon turned over to a mortuary by the son and buried. Another of his patients, Louis Nisco, was frozen in September 1967 after some damaging delay, and ended up at CSC because they offered the lowest storage rates. A third patient was Donald Kester, Sr., who committed suicide in July 1968. He was thawed and buried by his son a year or so later.