Becoming Mortician Research Paper

“Behind the Formaldehyde Curtain” is an essay written by Jessica Mitford. She creates a clear replica of the funeral industry in her essay. She explains about how the funeral directors do not consult the kin of the deceased before the process. The goal of Mitford is to share many of the practices of the funeral industry, and show how barbaric they are.The tone of the essay is to inform people about the process, from the deceased first arriving to the morgue until the end of the funeral service. She discussed about the embalming and the industry in her essay.

Dead?" AlterNet. In this article, Frankie Colmane looks into how dead bodies are treated in the United State even after Mitford's expose of the funeral industry was published. The article takes both a philosophical and scientific issue with the procedure of embalming sighting proven negative effects to human beings and the environment. Colmane shows that even though people are aware of the malfeasance and misappropriations of the funeral industry following pieces like Mitford's, very little has changed. Therefore problems that have been discussed in earlier works should not be forgotten. Rather they should be continually brought up until the issue is solved. During the 1800s, embalming became common practice because the dead family member would lie in state within the home for a period of days or weeks until it would be buried (Colmane 2010). The article shows the duplicity such as when "funeral directors were arguing forcefully against charges that their mediation between the living and the dead translated into social obstruction that barred the stricken from facing death with maturity, realism, and honest" (page 2). This article will be used to illustrate that things have not changed with funereal practices despite the publication of Mitford's essay.

Moreover, they have to keep secrets within their practice. The Funeral director position is an overlooked, mentally demanding and exhausting job that often goes without any appreciation in our communities until we lose a loved one. Many other professions deal with death for example, doctors and police, but those professions are widely praised and recognized unlike most Funeral directors. They love serving people, but struggle to maintain a personal life along their work that deals solely with death. Depression is a common outcome for this profession as they deal heavily with the isolation their job

After reading, The Embalming of Mr. Jones by Jessica Mitford, I was in shock about the whole process that happens hour after death. Previously, when I heard about embalming I thought they basically just cleaned the body up and dressed them up for the casket showing, but now that I know what actually happens I’m a little grossed out. The body shouldn’t be changed so much because you want to see them as you last remember not reconstructed due to the embalming. While the bodies are deceased, I can't help but wonder if they are feeling all of this happening. I feel bad for Mr. Jones and others who have been through the process. I can’t even imagine what it is like for the embalmer, and how they can go through with it.

According to an essay written by Jessica Mitford titled “Embalming in the U.S.A” states that the mass population in the United States have lost interest of embalming over the years. She later proves this by saying “not one in ten thousand has any idea what actually takes place and books on the subject are extremely rare to come by”. She later goes on saying that America has made a complete reversal on how the treated the Embalming. In the old days of America it was mandatory for one of the family members of the deceased to stay with the mortician while he carried on his business. Now in these the majority of people cannot stand the sight of blood. As the essay continues Jessica later states how She under stands

My first experience embalming a body was with case number ninety-four. In this case, the embalmer allowed me to do most of the preparation work. The embalmer shaved the face because I was not yet comfortable doing this step in preparation. Then, I disinfected the body. Next, I positioned their arms and hands. Once their arms were positioned, I went back up to the face to disinfect all orifices and to make sure the face was properly cleaned. My next step, involved placing eye caps in the eye to ensure closure. Then I proceeded to the mouth to close it using a needle injector.

Being a funeral director takes having a strong stomach and skill dealing with grief. There are many different ways people mourn. Religions have different rites as well as celebration of someone’s life. Every culture and civilization has three common threads dealing with death and their final internment. There are three main steps when someone dies. First is the preparation of the body, then some type of ceremony, and finally internment.

Your cell phone rings in the middle of the night and you are notified that you have to go to work. After hastily getting ready, you find yourself walking down a hallway; you turn into an empty doorway and enter a dark, cold room that is filled with lifeless bodies waiting to be attended to. This may be an unfavorable situation to many, but to a funeral director, it is just another day at work. In order to become a funeral director, one must be genuinely interested, willing to fulfill the job requirements, be able to cope with death on a daily basis, and still maintain a positive outlook on life.

When you are dead nothing is expected of you, your time is spent laying on your back and the brain completely shuts down. While being dead one will find their limbs floppy and uncooperative and their mouth will be hanging open at all times. Being dead is unappealing and smelly. Some dead people are beautiful and others look like monsters, some are dressed in sweat pants or suits and others are naked. Some indivuadls are in pieces and other are completely whole, all their bones remain attached. STIFF, a book by Mary Roach, presents the topic of cadavers, the use of them, how they can be beneficial and whether using cadavers is morally right.

     One of the duties of a mortician is to embalm the corpse for show. "If

As the paragraph above states: we all die, and though we are all different we all share just that. But what happens when we die? where do we go? what happens to our bodies? Thats where a mortician comes in. A mortician or undertaker, are both artists and scientists. The career of the funeral director is a combination of jobs and is never

The morticians embalms the body for the body can be displayed during the funeral and in the funeral home. (A lot of people usually gets a mortician and a funeral director mixed up)(Mortician School. net) Let me tell you the difference between the two , the funeral director can pick the body up from the place the person dies at but they can not embalm the body. The mortician takes the body clean the body , wash the body, do the hair , the makeup and maybe sometimes sit with the families.

(Lamers 535). You would be required to fill in any open wounds left on the body

Today the society is looking for ways to ease life and to find solutions for problems which oppress our lives and make it hard to live through. Because of many reasons, the traditional burials in this century are becoming a problem. (Prothero,2001). The fact that they cover a lot of land to build cemeteries and other things that are attached to these traditional burials is enough for us to search for a practical solution. About a century ago the term "cremation" was unknown to many people. It is believed that it began to be practiced during the early Stone Age and still exists today. Since that time cremations have been made all

Identified by the majority as "funeral directors” in America, these specialists have transformed the twentieth-century experience of death and body disposal. On the flip side though, this does not mean that they have made things any easier.