Preserving the End: The Economics of Embalming and the Multi-Billion Dollar Monopoly of the American Funeral Industry

Death is inevitable, but the elaborate, highly chemical, and exorbitantly expensive process of modern American burial is a relatively recent, purely commercial invention. In almost no other country is it standard practice to replace the blood of the deceased with toxic formaldehyde and display them in a velvet-lined, gasket-sealed steel vault.

Preserving the End traces the birth of the American funeral industry back to the Civil War, where embalming was marketed as a necessity to ship fallen...