Change, especially when it involves long held and deeply ingrained traditions, often happens in a slow incremental progression. Then something happens that causes a rapid acceleration and the way we do things is forever changed. Take, for example, cooking and eating at home. Humans hunted, grew, and cooked their own food for hundreds of years. And then, ever so slowly, folks started to specialize. Some grew and others purchased, some hunted and fished, and others purchased, some processed the grain and others purchased. Even when we no longer participated in all of the steps required to get a meal on the table, moms still cooked and families ate at home around the kitchen table. Some might say the Macdonald brothers, with their revamped hamburger restaurant a.k.a. “fast food,” were the catalyst for the way we eat today. These days, we are less inclined to cook our food and more likely to present food we purchased already prepared on our spacious home island. Life changed; some say for the better and others long for the good old days.

Similarly, the funeral profession moved along slowly for many years. Neighbor helping neighbor with death care duties gradually morphed into furniture makers who became coffin makers. People who had the tools and were accustomed to “digging” hired out to prepare graves. Bit by bit, the tasks involved in the care of the dead moved from the work of the family and came to involve skilled labor workers who offered assistance to families in need. Still, the care of the dead remained primarily a family matter until 1838 when the Frenchman Jean Gannel published “Histoire des Embaumements.” A primer for embalming the deceased.

Embalming was not entirely unknown before that time—certainly ancient peoples, including the Egyptians, had embalmed. But the publication of Mr. Gannel’s method of arterial embalming, where the blood is drained from the body and replaced with a chemical that retards deterioration, provided a means of preservation of the dead previously largely unknown. That this event coincided with the American Civil War was the spark that changed how we care for the dead today and the impetus for the birth of the funeral profession. Availability of a service met a heightened need for that service.

More than six hundred thousand men lost their lives in the Civil War, the bloodiest war to date in American history. Many died far from home. The war created the need to preserve the dead so that they could be returned home to enable their loved ones to “gaze upon their countenance” one final time and bury them near family.

Of the 600,000 who died in the Civil War, approximately 40,000 were embalmed. The majority were buried where they fell. Most of those who were embalmed fought on the side of preservation of the Union. They died far from home as the majority of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War were fought on southern soil.

At the start there were no requirements for licensure or training to embalm. Opportunists learned what they could from Gannel’s book and took to the fields. The results were inconsistent to say the least. In order to assure grieving families were not taken advantage of, the Department of War issued a general order requiring that only licensed persons could offer embalming services to bereaved family members. This requirement for embalmers to be licensed was the beginning of the funeral profession.

Then President Abraham Lincoln embraced the concept of embalming. When his young son Willie died, Mr. Lincoln had him embalmed. Three years later when Lincoln himself was assassinated, he too was embalmed. For many Americans, the president’s postmortem train trip from Washington DC to Illinois for burial was their first exposure to the benefit of embalming. The people were amazed that they were able to see and pay their respects to their beloved president days after his death as he made the long journey to his final resting place.

Today, we might call Lincoln an “influencer.” The science, improved, recorded, and shared by Gannel, “professionalized” by the Department of War requiring licensure to protect mourners from being taken advantage of, and embraced by President Lincoln as an early adopter birthed the funeral profession that we know and trust today.

Today, our options have multiplied. We can choose to be embalmed, cremated, or buried. We can choose to have a faith-based service or a secular celebration of life. We can choose to have an almost immediate burial, or we can wait for a more convenient time. We can even choose to have a home-based funeral service. Regardless of how we decide to say good-bye to our loved ones, we have access to the guidance of caring professionals: our local funeral directors, who operate under the guidelines and legal requirements of the state in which we reside. We are no longer required to go it alone. When we need them the most, we have our funeral director just a phone call away.

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