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The most complex development in the 19th century funeral business came in the treatment of the remains. Probably the first man to practice intravenous embalming in the U.S. was Thomas H. Holmes of New York, a flashy individual who made $400,000 during the Civil War by embalming war dead, lost it all and went to live in Brooklyn, where he manufactured embalming fluid as well as "a tasty root beer." Competitors soon came out with "Crane's Electro-Dynamic Mummifier," "Professor Rhodes' Electric Balm," and a popular fluid known as Utopia." In 1882 the first embalming school offered a three-week course.
In less than a century, the hasty funeral jobber became something like a theatrical producer, and with proper pride he set about rouging away his social stigma He changed his title from "undertaker" "mortician" and later to "funeral director." The "curbstone undertakers" were curbed by their colleagues, and sanitary standards were generally set up before the law got around to it. In some states it now takes three years—two in college and one in a school of "mortuary science''—to get an undertaker's diploma.
The Black Book. The body business, however, is one of the few in the U.S. today that are not booming. Though the U.S. birth rate has been fairly constant since 1900, the death rate has been cut in half. In 1888 an average undertaker could expect to handle almost 100 funerals in twelve months; nowadays, he is lucky to beat 60. Few funeral directors today are so unseemly as to chase an ambulance themselves, but most of them have "personal contacts" in hospitals.
But as regards credit, at least, the business is on sound footing—a fact foreshadowed in the 19th century by a trade practice known as "the black book," which operated to the effect that no undertaker would provide a funeral for a family that still owed another undertaker for another. Today most funeral directors have to write off less than 2% of their income to bad debts.
Turning from the financial to the psychological ledger, the book suggests one conclusion: the funeral ethic of 20th century America makes the most serious attempt in history to blink the ultimate fact. With its primped remains and imitation-grass-carpeted graves, it sets out to pull death's sting and all too often removes its significance, too. In "modern mortuary method," the funeral sermon is frequently nothing more than God's commercial, grooved in, as the authors explain, to "expedite the mourning process," and grief is classified as a "problem of bereavement." Instead of eternal life, the customer is more apt to be promised that in his final resting place he will receive, upon payment into a small sinking fund, "perpetual care."