Using a historical framework, this book offers not only the penal history of the death penalty in the states that have given women the death penalty, but it also retells the stories of the women who have been executed and those currently awaiting their fate on death row. This work takes a historical look at women and the death penalty in the United States from 1900 to 1998. It gives the reader a look at the penal codes in the various states regarding the death penalty and the personal stories of women who have been executed or who are currently on death row. As Americans continue to debate the enforcement of the death penalty, the issues of race and gender as they relate to the death penalty are also debated. This book offers a unique perspective to a recurring sociopolitical issue.

This book is a collection of mortality abstracts based on recent follow-up studies on the results of health disorders from the abstracts and articles appearing recently in the Journal of Insurance Medicine. The widely different types of investigators who may have repeated need of outcome data (death or morbid event) in a particular disease or risk factor will find this collection invaluable. Such a collection is valuable not only to users in the insurance industry, but to all physicians and health scientists who are interested in prognosis of chronic diseases, in clinical trials, in cost/benefit questions, in clinical decision-making, and similar fields of inquiry.

Bringing together the views of numerous distinguished scholars, Children and Death investigates the child's concept of death from both academic and clinical points of view. The contributors have aimed at developing practical guidelines for a multidisciplinary approach to the care and support of the dying child, the child's family unit, and staff who work with dying children. The findings presented here are also applicable to care of children with life-threatening illness. Topics discussed include: children's concepts of death; emotional impact of disease; perspectives on children's death and dying; and coping with a child's death.

Museums and Photography combines a strong theoretical approach with international case studies to investigate the display of death in various types of museums-history, anthropology, art, ethnographic, and science museums - and to understand the changing role of photography in museums. Contributors explore the politics and poetics of displaying death, and more specifically, the role of photography in representing and interpreting this difficult topic. Working with nearly 20 researchers from different cultural backgrounds and disciplines, the editors critically engage the recent debate on the changing role of museums, exhibition meaning-making, and the nature of photography. They offer new ways for understanding representational practices in relation to contemporary visual culture. This book will appeal to researchers and museum professionals, inspiring new thinking about death and the role of photography in making sense of it.

The dead are potent and omnipresent in modern Indonesia. Presidents and peasants alike meditate before sacred graves to exploit the power they confer, and mediums do good business curing the sick by interpreting the wishes of deceased forebears. Among non-Muslims there are ritual burials of the bones of the dead in monuments both magnificent and modest. By promoting dead heroes to a nationalist pantheon, regions and ethnic groups establish their place within the national story.Although much has been written about the local forms of the scriptural religions to which modern Indonesians are required by law to adhere - Islam, Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism - this is the first book to assess the indigenous systems of belief in the spirits of ancestors. Sometimes these systems are condemned in the name of the formal religions, but more often the potent dead coexist as a private dimension of everyday religious practice.A unique team of anthropologists, historians and literary scholars from Europe, Australia and North America demonstrate the continuing importance of the potent dead for understanding contemporary Indonesia. At the same time, they help us understand historic processes of conversion to Islam and Christianity by examining the continuing interactions of the spirit world with formal religion.

"This is an important book that no suicidologist should be without. In it, the author, Edwin S. Shneidman, brings together work he undertook and completed between 1971 and 1993. This work includes an empirical study, some single case studies, some theoretical think pieces, and some suggestions for psychotherapy. In this volume, Suicide as Psychache: A Clinical Approach to Self-Destructive Behavior, Shneidman introduces the concept of psychache, adding to the existing vocabulary on suicide to which he has contributed so generously. Shneidman defines psychache as the hurt, anguish, soreness, aching, psychological pain in the mind. Suicide occurs, he says, when the person experiencing the psychache deems the pain unbearable, suicide having to do with differences in individual thresholds for enduring psychological pain. Other concepts that bear Shneidman's imprint include suicidology, psychological autopsy, postvention, subintentional death, and postself. In the language of Suicide as Psychache, the growing numbers of people committing suicide in the United States give testimony to the growing prevalence of psychache in the U. S. population. Like all of Shneidman's work, this book goes well beyond its primary intent in that it is much more than a book about suicide. It is a theoretical book about the psychology of human behavior as reflected in suicide and about creative ways of investigating and responding to suicide phenomena. The book is divided into four parts: Foundations, Analyses, Response, and Follow-Up. This review, being a review, cannot possibly do justice to Shneidman's Suicide as Psychache: A Clinical Approach to Self-Destructive Behavior. It contains so many rich insights coupled with interesting literary references that help to enlarge readers' understanding and knowledge that persons are advised to read the book for themselves. By bringing together his earlier work and building on it, Shneidman allows readers to witness the evolution in his thinking about life and human behavior a

"Fatal Freedom" is an eloquent defense of every individual's right to choose a voluntary death. The author, a renowned psychiatrist, believes that we can speak about suicide calmly and rationally, as he does in this book, and that we can ultimately accept suicide as part of the human condition. By maintaining statutes that determine that voluntary death is not legal, our society is forfeiting one of its basic freedoms and causing the psychiatric/medical establishment to treat individuals in a manner that is disturbingly inhumane according to Dr. Szasz. His important work asks and points to clear, intelligent answers to some of the most significant ethical questions of our time:

Is suicide a voluntary act?

Should physicians be permitted to prevent it?

Should they be authorized to abet it?

The author's thoughtful analysis of these questions consistently holds forth patient autonomy as paramount; therefore, he argues, patients should not be prevented from exercising their free will, nor should physicians be permitted to enter the process by prescribing or providing the means for voluntary death.

Dr. Szasz predicts that we will look back at our present prohibitory policies toward suicide with the same amazed disapproval with which we regard past policies toward homosexuality, masturbation, and birth control. This comparison with other practices that started as sins, became crimes, then were regarded as mental illnesses, and are now becoming more widely accepted, opens up the discussion and understanding of suicide in a historical context. The book explores attitudes toward suicide held by the ancient Greeks and Romans, through early Christianity and the Reformation, to the advent of modern psychiatry and contemporary society as a whole. Our tendency to define disapproved behaviors as diseases has created a psychiatric establishment that exerts far too much influence over how and when we choose to die. Just as we have come to accept the individual's right to birth control, so too must we accept his right to death control before we can call our society humane or free.

There is something unsettling, but also powerful, in the encounter with individual and collective experiences of human suffering. Intensive Media explores the discomfort and fascination initiated by instances of pain and suffering, their 'aversive affects', as they trouble but also vitalise contemporary media environments. In the contexts of crisis, conflict and suffering explored throughout this book, aversive affect operates micropolitically to make explicit or hide the material conditions that surround instances of pain in all its specificity. That is, in so many scenarios, personal, social and political stakes are set around the thresholds of intensity that give rise to a 'sense' of pain and the unpredictable valences of its aversive affects. It is in this sense that McCosker and his case studies develop outwards from the middle of what has been referred to as 'the problem of pain', a problem that traverses media, communication, art, sociality and politics in their confrontation with affect, biology and neurophysiology.

This book offers the first account of the dead as an imagined community in the early nineteenth-century. It examines why Romantic and Victorian writers (including Wordsworth, Dickens, De Quincey, Godwin, and D'Israeli) believed that influencing the imaginative conception of the dead was a way to either advance, or resist, social and political reform. This interdisciplinary study contributes to the burgeoning field of Death Studies by drawing on the work of both canonical and lesser-known writers, reformers, and educationalists to show how both literary representation of the dead, and the burial and display of their corpses in churchyards, dissecting-rooms, and garden cemeteries, responded to developments in literary aesthetics, psychology, ethics, and political philosophy. Imagining the Dead in British Literature and Culture, 1790-1848 shows that whether they were lauded as exemplars or loathed as tyrants, rendered absent by burial, or made uncannily present through exhumation and display, the dead were central to debates about the shape and structure of British society as it underwent some of the most radical transformations in its history.

A vital roadmap to planning your own end-of-life care. While modern Americans strive to control nearly every aspect of their lives, many of us abandon control of life's final passage. But the realities of twenty-first-century medicine will allow most of us to have a say in how, when, and where we die, so we need to make decisions surrounding death, too. Or those decisions may be made for us. Threading compelling real-life stories and practical guidance throughout, this book helps readers navigate end-of-life care for themselves and their loved ones. In this practical guidebook, Dr. Dan Morhaim and Shelley Morhaim offer readers hope, empowerment, and inspiration. What we choose for our end-of-life care, they assert, depends on accurate information and on our personal values. We need these not only to understand new medical advances but also to appreciate the wisdom of humanity's past and present. Dan Morhaim, an emergency medicine physician and former Maryland state legislator, guides readers through the medical, legal, and financial maze of end-of-life care. He details the care choices available to patients and explains why living wills and advance directives are a necessity for every American. He tells readers where to find free and readily available living wills and advance directives and why it is so important for everyone-young and old-to complete them. Meanwhile, Shelley Morhaim draws on her experience as a therapeutic music practitioner for hospice and hospital patients to offer compassion to readers facing hard decisions. The authors reflect on a number of timely topics, including * what doctors-including Dr. Morhaim specifically-want for themselves in terms of end-of-life care * how legislative initiatives on assisted dying vary by state * how to obtain medical orders for life-sustaining treatment (MOLST/POLST) * how to deal with dementia * what to expect from palliative and hospice care * how to cope with pain at the end of life, including with medical cannabis and narcotics * how organ donation and body disposition work * how to communicate individual needs to lawyers, physicians, and family members * how to make decisions when selecting the best care for yourself and others and more. Organized as a roadmap that people should follow when they plan end-of-life care and contingencies, this book helps readers keep decisions in their own hands and spare their families the uncertainty and trauma of guessing about their end-of-life wishes. Breaking down the barriers to a difficult but essential topic, Preparing for a Better End helps readers open this often-avoided discussion with their loved ones while providing the information and guidance needed to ensure that deeply held values are reflected and honored. Praise for the Author "In The Better End, Dr. Morhaim helps the reader to see that while death does have its sting, it need not be bitter, and each of us can prepare for the end in better ways."-Maya Angelou "Dan Morhaim's message is a must read for anyone who is facing end-of-life crisis issues and concerns, whether it be for themselves or for a family member or loved one. When so many others shun away from the topic, Dan Morhaim addresses the situation with clarity, insight, and sensitivity."-Montel Williams

This book is the first comprehensive assessment of the mortality crisis which has affected most economies in transition but which has remained so far largely unexplained. It reconciles long-term and short-term explanations of the crisis and makes use of special micro data-sets never used before. By providing a rigorous multidisciplinary analysis of this upsurge in mortality rates, the book hopes to contribute to the launch of vigorous policies to tackle this societal problem.

Encountering evidence of postmortem examinations - dissection or autopsy in historic skeletal collections is relatively rare, but recently there has been an increase in the number of reported instances. And much of what has been evaluated has been largely descriptive and historical. The Bioarchaeology of Dissection and Autopsy brings together in a single volume the skeletal evidence of postmortem examination in the United States. Ranging from the early colonial period to the early 1900's, from a coffeehouse at Colonial Williamsburg to a Quaker burial vault in lower Manhattan, the contributions to this volume demonstrate the interpretive significance of a historically and theoretically contextualized bioarchaeology. The authors employ a wide range of perspectives, demonstrating how bioarchaeological evidence can be used to address a wide range of themes including social identity and marginalization, racialization, the nature of the body and fragmentation, and the emergence of medical practice and authority in the United States.

Death in war matters. It matters to the individual, threatened with their own death, or the death of loved ones. It matters to groups and communities who have to find ways to manage death, to support the bereaved and to dispose of bodies amidst the confusion of conflict. It matters to the state, which has to find ways of coping with mass death that convey a sense of gratitude and respect for the sacrifice of both the victims of war, and those that mourn in their wake. This social and cultural history of Britain in the Second World War places death at the heart of our understanding of the British experience of conflict. Drawing on a range of material, Dying for the nation demonstrates just how much death matters in wartime and examines the experience, management and memory of death. It will appeal to anyone with an interest in the social and cultural history of Britain in the Second World War. -- .

This study reassesses the criminal body from sentencing to execution and afterlife, using the nineteenth-century Red Barn murder as a case study. Positioned within the burgeoning field of medical humanities, it places culture and power at the centre of debates surrounding criminal justice and public punishment.

'Fascinating... life affirming' Times Literary Supplement 'Without exaggeration, an awe-inspiring achievement' Nigella Lawson Chosen as an Irish Times Book of the Year In this profoundly moving and remarkable book, journalist Hayley Campbell explores society's attitudes towards death, and the impact on those who work with it every day. 'If the reason we're outsourcing this burden is because it's too much for us,' she asks, 'how do they deal with it?' Would facing death directly make us fear it less? Inspired by her own childhood fascination with the subject, she meets embalmers and a former death row executioner, mass fatality investigators and a bereavement midwife. She talks to gravediggers who have already dug their own graves and questions a man whose job it is to make crime scenes disappear. Through Campbell's incisive and candid interviews with people who see death every day, she asks: Does seeing death change you as a person? And are we all missing something vital by letting death remain hidden? 'Moving, funny, and liable to unexpectedly cause me to tear up' Neil Gaiman 'Essential, compassionate, honest' Audrey Niffenegger

The decline of infections, starvation, heart attack, and stroke has allowed people to reach extreme old age--and ushered in disability, dementia, and degenerative disease, with profound consequences for the self and society. In chapters echoing Dante's nine circles of hell, Dr. Guy Brown explores these vital issues at various levels, from the cell, to the whole body, to society and how all this new medical technology affects the meaning of death. He tracks the seismic shifts in the causes and character of death that are rocking medicine and reveals how technological innovations, such as cloning and electronic interfaces, hint at new modes of "survival" after death.