This book is a brief but comprehensive survey of research, writings, and professional practices concerned with death and dying. It is interdisciplinary and eclectic--medical, psychological, religious, philosophical, artistic, demographics, bereavement, and widowhood are all considered--but with an emphasis on psychological aspects. A variety of viewpoints and research findings on topics subsumed under "thanatology" receive thorough consideration. Questions, activities, and projects at the end of each chapter enhance reflection and personalize the material.
This fourth edition features material on:
* moral issues and court cases concerned with abortion and euthanasia;
* the widespread problem of AIDS and other deadly diseases;
* the tragedies occasioned by epidemics, starvation, and war; and
* the resumption of capital punishment in many states.
The book's enhanced multicultural tone reflects the increased economic, social, and physical interdependency among the nations of the world.
Topics receiving increased attention in the fourth edition are: terror management; attitudes and practices concerning death; cross-cultural concepts of afterlife; gallows humor, out-of-body experiences; spiritualism; mass suicide; pet and romantic death; euthanasia; right to die; postbereavement depression; firearm deaths in children; children's understanding of death; child, adolescent, adult, and physician-assisted suicide; religious customs and death; confronting death; legal issues in death, dying and bereavement; death education; death music; creativity and death; longevity; broken heart phenomenon; beliefs in life after death; new definitions of death; children's acceptance of a parent's death; terminal illness; and the politics of death and dying.

Issues of Death offers a fresh approach to the tragic drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Starting from the premise that death is a historical construct that is differently experienced in every culture, it treats Renaissance tragedy as an instrument for re-imagining the human encounter with death. Analyses of major plays by Marlowe, Kyd, Shakespeare, Webster, Middleton, and Ford explore the relation of tragedy to the macabre tradition, to the apocalyptic displays of the anatomy theatre, and to the spectacular arts of funeral.

After Homicide describes the collective responses of bereaved people to the aftermath of violent death, a subject not dealt with in any detail in the literature that is currently available. The book concentrates particularly on the birth, development and organization of the self help and campaigning groups that emerged in the last decade. The author examines these as attempts to give institutional expression to interpretations of grief.

In addition, the author had special access to a number of groups and uses the infomation that he gathered through this access to discuss the practical and political importance of the work of these groups, and their affects on policing, the media and the law.

The third edition of Hospice and Palliative Care is the essential guide to the hospice and palliative care movement both within the United States and around the world. Chapters provide mental-health and medical professionals with a comprehensive overview of the hospice practice as well as discussions of challenges and the future direction of the hospice movement. Updates to the new edition include advances in spiritual assessment and care, treatment of prolonged and complicated grief, provision of interdisciplinary palliative care in limited-resource settings, significant discussion of assisted suicide, primary healthcare including oncology, and more. Staff and volunteers new to the field along with experienced care providers and those using hospice and palliative care services will find this essential reading.

This engrossing book explores family experiences of dying, death, grieving, and mourning between 1830 and 1920. Victorian letters and diaries reveal a deep preoccupation with death because of a shorter life expectancy, a high death rate for infants and children, and a dominant Christian culture. Using the private correspondence, diaries, and death memorials of fifty-five middle and upper-class British families, Pat Jalland shows us how dying, death, and grieving were experienced by Victorian families and how the manner and rituals of death and mourning varied with age, gender, disease, religious belief, family size and class. She examines deathbed scenes, good and bad deaths, funerals and cremations, widowhood, and the roles of religion and medicine. Chapters on the deaths of children and old people demonstrate the importance of the stages of the life-cycle, as well as the failure of many actual deathbeds to achieve the Christian ideal of the good death. The consolations of Christian faith and private memory, and the transformation in the ideas and beliefs about heaven, hell, and immortality are analysed. The rise and decline of Evangelicalism, the influence of unbelief and secularism, falling mortality, and the trauma of the Great War are all key motors of change in this period. This fascinating study of death and bereavement in the past helps us to understand the present, especially in the context of the modern tendency to avoid the subject of dying, and to minimize the public expression of grief. In their practical and compassionate treatment of death, the Victorians have much to teach us today.

The early accounts of one of the most famous scenes in Christian history, the death of Peter, do not present a single narrative of the events, for they do not agree on why Peter requested to die in the precise way that he allegedly did. Over time, historians and theologians have tended to smooth over these rough edges, creating the impression that the ancient sources all line up in a certain direction. This impression, however, misrepresents the evidence. The reason for Peter's inverted crucifixion is not the only detail on which the sources diverge. In fact, such disagreement can be seen concerning nearly every major narrative point in the martyrdom accounts of Peter and Paul. The Many Deaths of Peter and Paul shows that the process of smoothing over differences in order to create a master narrative about the deaths of Peter and Paul has distorted the evidence. This process of distortion not only blinds us to differences in perspective among the various authors, but also discourages us from digging deeper into the contexts of those authors to explore why they told the stories of the apostolic deaths differently in their contexts. David L. Eastman demonstrates that there was never a single, unopposed narrative about the deaths of Peter and Paul. Instead, stories were products of social memory, told and re-told in order to serve the purposes of their authors and their communities. The history of the writing of the many deaths of Peter and Paul is one of contextualized variety.

The state has no greater power over its own citizens than that of killing them. This remarkable and disturbing history of capital punishment in Germany deals with the politics of the death penalty and the experience and cultural significance of executions. Richards Evans casts new light on the history of German attitudes to law, deviance, cruelty, suffering and death, illuminating many aspects of Germany's modern political development. He has made a formidable contribution not only to scholarship on German history but also to the social theory of punishment, and to the current debate on the death penalty.

The conventional approach to suicide is psychiatric: ask the average person why people kill themselves, and they will likely cite depression. But this approach fails to recognize suicide's social causes. People kill themselves because of breakups and divorces, because of lost jobs and ruined finances, because of public humiliations and the threat of arrest. While some psychological approaches address external stressors, this comprehensive study is the first to systematically examine suicide as a social behavior with social catalysts. Drawing on Donald Black's theories of conflict management and pure sociology, Suicide presents a new theory of the social conditions that compel an aggrieved person to turn to self-destruction. Interpersonal conflict plays a central but underappreciated role in the incidence of suicide. Examining a wide range of cross-cultural cases, Jason Manning argues that suicide arises from increased inequality and decreasing intimacy, and that conflicts are more likely to become suicidal when they occur in a context of social inferiority. As suicide rates continue to rise around the world, this timely new theory can help clinicians, scholars, and members of the general public to explain and predict patterns of self-destructive behavior.

A victim of the Hillsborough Disaster in 1989, Anthony Bland lay in hospital in a coma being fed liquid food by a pump, via a tube passing through his nose and into his stomach. On 4 February 1993 Britain's highest court ruled that doctors attending him could lawfully act to end his life. Our traditional ways of thinking about life and death are collapsing. In a world of respirators and embryos stored for years in liquid nitrogen, we can no longer take the sanctity of human life as the cornerstone of our ethical outlook. In this controversial book Peter Singer argues that we cannot deal with the crucial issues of death, abortion, euthanasia and the rights of nonhuman animals unless we sweep away the old ethic and build something new in its place. Singer outlines a new set of commandments, based on compassion and commonsense, for the decisions everyone must make about life and death.

From antebellum slavery to the twenty-first century, African American funeral directors have orchestrated funerals or homegoing ceremonies with dignity and pageantry. As entrepreneurs in a largely segregated trade, they were among the few black individuals in any community who were economically independent and not beholden to the local white power structure. Most important, their financial freedom gave them the ability to support the struggle for civil rights and, indeed, to serve the living as well as bury the dead.

During the Jim Crow era, black funeral directors relied on racial segregation to secure their foothold in America s capitalist marketplace. With the dawning of the civil rights age, these entrepreneurs were drawn into the movement to integrate American society, but were also uncertain how racial integration would affect their business success. From the beginning, this tension between personal gain and community service shaped the history of African American funeral directing.

For African Americans, death was never simply the end of life, and funerals were not just places to mourn. In the hush harbors of the slave quarters, African Americans first used funerals to bury their dead and to plan a path to freedom. Similarly, throughout the long and often violent struggle for racial equality in the twentieth century, funeral directors aided the cause by honoring the dead while supporting the living. "To Serve the Living" offers a fascinating history of how African American funeral directors have been integral to the fight for freedom.

Contents:
Part 1 The Child's Perspective of Death: Children's Understandings of Death - Striving to Understand Death; Grieving Children: Can We Answer Their Questions. Part 2 The Child's Response to Life-Threatening Illness: Talking to Children About Illness; The Child and Life-Threatening Illness; Children and HIV: Orphans and Victims. Part 3 Children Mourning, Mourning Children: Grief of Children and Parents; Children and Traumatic Loss; How Can We Help; The Role of School. Part 4 Innovative Research: World of Dying Children and Their Well Siblings; The Empty Space Phenomenon: The Process of Grief in the Bereaved Family; A Sampler of Literature for Young Readers: Death, Dying and Bereavement.

This second edition contains 10 new essays. It addresses itself to certain basic issues inherent in a philosophy of death. Principal themes explored are: the meaning of death; the nature of the soul; and the prospects for immortality.

Capital punishment is one of the more controversial subjects in the social sciences, especially in criminal justice and criminology. Over the last decade or so, the United States has experienced a significant decline in the number of death sentences and executions. Since 2007, eight states have abolished capital punishment, bringing the total number of states without the death penalty to 19, plus the District of Columbia, and more are likely to follow suit in the near future (Nebraska reinstated its death penalty in 2016). Worldwide, 70 percent of countries have abolished capital punishment in law or in practice. The current trend suggests the eventual demise of capital punishment in all but a few recalcitrant states and countries. Within this context, a fresh look at capital punishment in the United States and worldwide is warranted. The Routledge Handbook on Capital Punishment comprehensively examines the topic of capital punishment from a wide variety of perspectives. A thoughtful introductory chapter from experts Bohm and Lee presents a contextual framework for the subject matter, and chapters present state-of-the-art analyses of a range of aspects of capital punishment, grouped into five sections: (1) Capital Punishment: History, Opinion, and Culture; (2) Capital Punishment: Rationales and Religious Views; (3) Capital Punishment and Constitutional Issues; (4) The Death Penalty's Administration; and (5) The Death Penalty's Consequences. This is a key collection for students taking courses in prisons, penology, criminal justice, criminology, and related subjects, and is also an essential reference for academics and practitioners working in prison service or in related agencies.

Does a dying child understand death? How can we help children who are dying? Originally published in 1993, this book concerns a young girl, Rachel, terminally ill with leukaemia. The book describes a series of drawings she made and shows how they reveal her inner experience, how she became fully aware that she was dying and even came to accept death. The result is a moving and informative story that will be invaluable to caregivers and families with a dying child. It provides new understanding of the experience of a dying child and suggests practical strategies for coping.

At the end of life, our comfort lies mainly in relationships. In this book, Daniel Miller, one of the world's leading anthropologists, examines the social worlds of people suffering from terminal or long-term illness. Threading together a series of personal stories, based on interviews conducted with patients of an English hospice, Miller draws out the implications of these narratives for our understanding of community, friendship, and kinship, but also loneliness and isolation. This is a book about people's lives, not their deaths: about the hospice patients rather than the hospice. It focuses on the comfort given by friends, carers and relatives through both face-to-face relations and, increasingly, online communication. Miller asks whether the loneliness and isolation he uncovers is the result of a decline of English patterns of socialising, or their continuation. This moving and deeply humane book combines warmth and sharp observation with anthropological insight and practical suggestions for the use of media by the hospice. It will be of interest not only to students and scholars of anthropology, sociology, social policy and media and cultural studies, but also to healthcare professionals and, indeed, to anyone who would like to know more about the role of relationships in the final stage of our lives.

Major religious traditions of the world contain perspectives of perennial importance on the topic of death and afterlife. Such concepts and beliefs are not only reflected directly in mortuary and funerary practices, but also inform patterns of beliefs and rituals that shape human lifestyles. Though evidenced in sacred texts, they cannot be fully understood in isolation by textual study alone. Rather, they must be explored in terms of a comprehensive understanding of the given religious system as rooted in an overall culture. Here thirteen scholars, each a specialist in a particular religious tradition, outline the beliefs, myths, and practices relating to death and afterlife. The volume introduction provides a framework for understanding the evolutionary relationships among world religions and the unity as well as the diversity of their quest for overcoming death. Part I comprises chapters on African religions representing the nonliterate religious experience and on ancient religions of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Greece. Studies of these religions serve as background for comprehending concepts relating to death and afterlife in the major world religions, which are dealt with in Part II, on Western religions, and Part III, on Eastern religions. The particular method of approach to each tradition is determined by the nature of the material. With death and afterlife as the common focus, this group of scholars has brought to bear its diverse expertise in anthropology, classics, archaeology, biblical studies, history, and theology. The result is a text important for comparative religion courses and, beyond that, a book extending our understanding of human thoughts and aspirations. It offers aglobal perspective from which an individual can ponder his or her own personal issues concerning death and afterlife.

How the legalization of assisted dying is changing our lives. Over the past five years, medical aid-in-dying (also known as assisted suicide) has expanded rapidly in the United States and is now legally available to one in five Americans. This growing social and political movement heralds the possibility of a new era of choice in dying. Yet very little is publicly known about how medical aid-in-dying laws affect ordinary citizens once they are put into practice. Sociological studies of new health policies have repeatedly demonstrated that the realities often fall short of advocacy visions, raising questions about how much choice and control aid-in-dying actually affords. Scripting Death chronicles two years of ethnographic research documenting the implementation of Vermont's 2013 Patient Choice and Control at End of Life Act. Author Mara Buchbinder weaves together stories collected from patients, caregivers, health care providers, activists, and legislators to illustrate how they navigate aid-in-dying as a new medical frontier in the aftermath of legalization. Scripting Death explains how medical aid-in-dying works, what motivates people to pursue it, and ultimately, why upholding the "right to die" is very different from ensuring access to this life-ending procedure. This unprecedented, in-depth account uses the case of assisted death as an entry point into ongoing cultural conversations about the changing landscape of death and dying in the United States.

This unique book recounts the experience of facing one's death solely from the dying person's point of view rather than from the perspective of caregivers, survivors, or rescuers. Such unmediated access challenges assumptions about the emotional and spiritual dimensions of dying, showing readers that -- along with suffering, loss, anger, sadness, and fear -- we can also feel courage, love, hope, reminiscence, transcendence, transformation, and even happiness as we die. A work that is at once psychological, sociological, and philosophical, this book brings together testimonies of those dying from terminal illness, old age, sudden injury or trauma, acts of war, and the consequences of natural disasters and terrorism. It also includes statements from individuals who are on death row, in death camps, or planning suicide. Each form of dying addressed highlights an important set of emotions and narratives that often eclipses stereotypical renderings of dying and reflects the numerous contexts in which this journey can occur outside of hospitals, nursing homes, and hospices.Chapters focus on common emotional themes linked to dying, expanding and challenging them through first-person accounts and analyses of relevant academic and clinical literature in psycho-oncology, palliative care, gerontology, military history, anthropology, sociology, cultural and religious studies, poetry, and fiction. The result is an all-encompassing investigation into an experience that will eventually include us all and is more surprising and profound than anyone can imagine.

Why is belief in an afterlife so persistent across times and cultures? And how can it coexist with disbelief in an afterlife? Most modern thinkers hold that afterlife belief serves such important psychological and social purposes as consoling survivors, enforcing morality, dispensing justice, or giving life meaning. Yet the earliest, and some more recent, afterlives strikingly fail to satisfy those needs. In Inventing Afterlives, Regina M. Janes proposes a new theory of the origins of the hereafter rooted in the question that a dead body raises: where has the life gone? Humans then and now, in communities and as individuals, ponder what they would want or experience were they in that body. From this endlessly recurring situation, afterlife narratives develop in all their complexity, variety, and ingenuity. Exploring afterlives from Egypt to Sumer, among Jews, Greeks, and Romans, to Christianity's advent and Islam's rise, Janes reveals how little concern ancient afterlives had with morality. In south and east Asia, karmic rebirth makes morality self-enforcing and raises a new problem: how to stop re-dying. The British enlightenment, Janes argues, invented the now widespread wish-fulfilling afterlife and illustrates how afterlives change. She also considers the surprising afterlife of afterlives among modern artists and writers who no longer believe in worlds beyond this one. Drawing on a variety of religious traditions; contemporary literature and film; primatology; cognitive science; and evolutionary psychology, Janes shows that in asking what happens after we die, we define the worlds we inhabit and the values by which we live.

Konflikte im Zusammenhang mit dem Themenkomplex Erben und Vererben sind unumganglich und Alltag in der Praxis des erbrechtlich tatigen Anwalts. Fur Erblasser kann sich nun die Frage stellen, ob die Aufnahme einer Schieds- oder Mediationsklausel in die geplante Verfugung von Todes wegen die Entstehung von Konflikten vermeiden oder reduzieren kann. Ebenso ist fraglich, ob die Erben oder Vermachtnisnehmer uberhaupt verpflichtet werden koennen ihren erbrechtlichen Streit durch ein Schieds- oder Mediationsverfahren beilegen zu mussen. Bei der Beantwortung dieser Fragen muss zuerst der erbrechtliche Konflikt naher betrachtet werden und anschliessend versucht werden, die Schieds- und Mediationsklausel rechtsdogmatisch einzuordnen. Nur so ist es moeglich, diese im System des Erbrechts zu platzieren und die Fragen nach der Rechtswirksamkeit einer letztwilligen Schieds- oder Mediationsklausel zu beantworten.

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This volume provides a series of illuminating perspectives on the timings of death, through in-depth studies of Shakespearean tragedy, criminal execution, embalming practices, fears of premature burial, rumours of Adolf Hitler's survival, and the legal concept of brain death. In doing so, it explores a number of questions, including: how do we know if someone is dead or not? What do people experience at the moment when they die? Is death simply a biological event that comes about in temporal stages of decomposition, or is it a social event defined through cultures, practices, and commemorations? In other words, when exactly is death? Taken together, these contributions explore how death emerges in a series of stages that are uncertain, paradoxical, and socially contested.

The latest volume in this multidisciplinary series on key topics in evolutionary studies, Evolutionary Perspectives on Death provides an evolutionary analysis of mortality and the consideration of death. Bringing together noted experts from a variety of fields, the books emanate from conferences held at Oakland University, and are dedicated to providing wide ranging and occasionally provocative views of human evolution. The volume on death covers topics from biology, anthropology, psychology, sociology and philosophy, with contributors addressing how evolution informs the process of comprehending, grieving, depicting, celebrating, and accepting death. Among the topics covered: Evolutionary perspectives on the loss of a twin Nonhuman primate responses to death Death in literature Witnessing and representing the death of pets The role of human decomposition facilities in shaping American perspectives on death This insightful volume showcases groundbreaking empirical and theoretical research addressing death and mortality from an evolutionary perspective, demonstrating the intellectual value of an interdisciplinary approach to understanding psychological processes and behavior. Chapter 6 of this book is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com.

Death Across Cultures: Death and Dying in Non-Western Cultures, explores death practices and beliefs, before and after death, around the non-Western world. It includes chapters on countries in Africa, Asia, South America, as well as indigenous people in Australia and North America. These chapters address changes in death rituals and beliefs, medicalization and the industry of death, and the different ways cultures mediate the impacts of modernity. Comparative studies with the west and among countries are included. This book brings together global research conducted by anthropologists, social scientists and scholars who work closely with individuals from the cultures they are writing about.

Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. The five stages of grief, first formulated in this hugely influential work forty years ago, are now part of our common understanding of bereavement. The five stages were first identified by Elisabeth K?bler-Ross in her work with dying patients at the University of Chicago and were considered phases that all or most people went through, when faced with the prospect of their own death. They are now often accepted as a response to any major life change.

However, in spite of these terms being in general use, the subject of death is still surrounded by conventional attitudes and reticence that offer only fragile comfort because they evade the real issues. This groundbreaking book is still relevant ? giving a voice to dying people and exploring what impending death means to them, often in their own words. People speak about their experience of dying, their relief in expressing their fear and anger and being able to move forward to a state of acceptance and peace.

Ideal for all those with an interest in bereavement or the five stages of grief, this book contains a new extended introduction from Professor Allan Kellehear. This additional chapter re-examines On Death and Dying looking at how it has influenced contemporary thought and practice.

Social Palliation is a pioneering study on living and dying as articulated by first-generation Iranian and Ismaili Muslim communities in Canada. Using ethnographic narratives, Parin Dossa makes a case for a paradigm shift from palliative care to social palliation. Experiences of displacement and resettlement reveal that life and death must be understood as an integrated unit if we are to appreciate what it is like to be awakened to our human existence. In the wake of structural exclusion and systemic suffering, social palliation brings to light displaced persons' endeavours to restore the integrity of life and death. Dossa highlights the point that death conjoined with life is embedded within the socio-cultural and spiritual experience. Here, a caring society is not perceived in fragments, as is the case with traditional institutional care or care offered during end-of-life. Rather, Dossa draws attention to an organic form of caring, illustrated through the trajectories of storied lives. In exemplifying more humane aspects of social palliation, this book foregrounds sacred traditions to illustrate their potential to evoke deep-level conversations across socio-political boundaries on what it is like to live and die in the contemporary world.