A group of enterprising young men began marketing their method of preserving the war’s casualties, using a pre-formaldehyde blend of chemicals including arsenic, zinc chloride, mercury, lead, salt, and various acids. Among them was Dr. Thomas Holmes, who would later be dubbed “the father of American embalming.” Holmes claimed to have personally embalmed more than 4,000 soldiers; he charged $100 per body.

Within a matter of decades, embalming was considered a highly specialized trade. The manual labor involved in picking up bodies and digging graves gained a medical sheen; embalmers insisted (and still insist) that their work protected the living from the dead, though scientific study has repeatedly shown that — with very few exceptions, Ebola being one of them — it is very hard to catch disease from dead bodies. (Embalmers, by contrast, come into direct contact with a known carcinogen each time they preserve a body: formaldehyde.)

No longer were bodies to be washed and displayed in the family home before burial. It was too risky, too unclean. Laypeople were encouraged to think of themselves as such; grieving and burial now required expert assistance. Undertaking became funeral direction.

The earliest mortuary schools were founded in the late 19th century by embalming chemical companies with the express purpose of teaching workers how to use their products. More than 120 years later, modern mortuary schools still exist primarily (if not exclusively) to teach students how to embalm.

But embalming is on the decline, and has been for some time. In its stead, cremation is booming: The national cremation rate in 2012 (the last year for which National Funeral Directors Association statistics are available) was 43.2%, up from 34.6% in 2007 and 26.17% in 2000. In some parts of the country, cremation rates are much higher: 74.2% in Nevada; 72.6% in Washington; figures right around 70% in Oregon, Hawaii, and Maine. Earlier this year, embalming was included in a list of disappearing middle-class jobs, with a projected 15% decline over the next 10 years.

And yet the funeral industry is slow to adjust for this. Most states have laws requiring funeral homes to have on-site embalming rooms, and many require casket showrooms as well. Cremation is hardly touched on in mortuary school, if at all. In order to become a licensed funeral director, graduating students must pass the national board exam — because the national board exam barely mentions cremation, the schools don’t either.

“You can actually get better training in the responsible and safe operation of a crematory by attending a two- or three-day seminar by the Cremation Association of North America than you get in mortuary school,” Josh Slocum tells me.

A former newspaper reporter, Slocum is the executive director of the Funeral Consumers Alliance, a ==501(c)(3)== charity that he likens to “Consumer Reports magazine for funerals and burials.” Its aim is to educate funeral consumers about their legal rights, which they do through reporting on industry trends at the national and state levels, providing funeral price comparison sheets and working with politicians to overturn or reverse industry laws they consider regressive and/or prohibitive.

“The problem with mortuary school is that it continues to propagate misinformation and outright falsehoods,” he says. "They are still teaching the bullshit that embalming is a public health measure. They're teaching a curriculum that is about 125 years old. Most of these schools spend about nine months on practical embalming and the remainder of the time with a smattering of business administration, some very poor pop psychology, and not nearly enough about the legal responsibilities and duties that funeral directors have to the consumer.”

I should note that Slocum is speaking of the vast majority of mortuary science programs that are two-year associate’s degrees; he’s less familiar with four-year bachelor’s programs like SUNY Canton’s, but he’s not optimistic they’re using that extra time to any great advantage. In Slocum’s view, the schools (and the profession at large) cling to embalming not only because embalmed funerals are the ones that make funeral directors the most money, but because it’s the only thing they can point to as a marketable skill.

“The only thing that funeral directors do that the rest of us don't is embalm. That's it. Everything else they do, the administration, the organizing, all of this stuff — all of this used to be done by American families themselves,” he says. “Taking care of a dead person is not rocket science.”

Slocum is careful to acknowledge that even if any one of us can wash, prepare, and bury our dead relatives on our own, most of us won’t want to. And while the national trend may be reversing, for now, most people still get embalmed. What’s crucial is that we know we don’t have to be — it is not required by law.

That most people don’t spend a lot of time thinking about why they might request embalming for themselves or their family members is troubling to Doughty, who believes that embalming as standard American death practice is largely arbitrary.

“When I talk about embalming not having a lot of meaning, there are some people — African-American culture especially, in the South — that have a huge amount of meaning around the embalming process,” she says. “I'm actually all for that. But for most of the rest of U.S. culture, they don't derive a lot of meaning from embalming. So what's the point of that? Why are we paying for that, why are we continuing to support it as an institution if it's not bringing us comfort and joy?”

Funeral direction need not be obsolete, Slocum says, but it does require a massive shift toward transparency, and away from the learned sanctimony. “They have it drugged into them that they are a special, almost priestly class of people who have this sacred calling. They're being taught to value themselves as the experts without whom nobody can deal with death.”

To better serve the population, mortuary schools have to change — so much so that Slocum isn’t sure it wouldn’t be easier to start over completely.

“If they all closed today, I don't think it would do any harm at all,” he says. “And it might actually do a little bit of good.”