Weird History
How Lincoln's Assassination Created the Billion Dollar Funeral Business
2021 • E58 May 14, 2021 10m
Abraham Lincoln was possibly our greatest president, and you would think his body would be treated with respect after he was assassinated at Ford’s Theatre on April 15, 1865. And in a way, it was: Lincoln became one of the first people in America to be embalmed. Seeing a well-preserved body drastically changed how people thought about death and funerals. Instead of seeing the ravages of time, they were able to look at a corpse that hardly seemed to have altered at all. People were comforted by the idea that death didn’t change anything, and decided embalming was the best way to go. Soon this process became a normal part of American death rituals.