How do the living maintain relations to the dead? Why do we bury people when they die? And what is at stake when we do? In "The Dominion of the Dead," Robert Pogue Harrison considers the supreme importance of these questions to Western civilization, exploring the many places where the dead cohabit the world of the living--the graves, images, literature, architecture, and monuments that house the dead in their afterlife among us.
This elegantly conceived work devotes particular attention to the practice of burial. Harrison contends that we bury our dead to humanize the lands where we build our present and imagine our future. As long as the dead are interred in graves and tombs, they never truly depart from this world, but remain, if only symbolically, among the living. Spanning a broad range of examples, from the graves of our first human ancestors to the empty tomb of the Gospels to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Harrison also considers the authority of predecessors in both modern and premodern societies. Through inspired readings of major writers and thinkers such as Vico, Virgil, Dante, Pater, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Rilke, he argues that the buried dead form an essential foundation where future generations can retrieve their past, while burial grounds provide an important bedrock where past generations can preserve their legacy for the unborn.
"The Dominion of the Dead" is a profound meditation on how the thought of death shapes the communion of the living. A work of enormous scope, intellect, and imagination, this book will speak to all who have suffered grief and loss.

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.

The main questions raised in this book are: How does the analyst help the patient to be in touch with pain and mourning? Is the relinquishment of defenses always desirable? And what is the analyst's role in the mourning process-should the analyst struggle to help patients relinquish defenses against pain and mourning, which they may experience as vital to their precarious psychic survival? Or should he or she accompany patients on their way to self-discovery, which may or may not result in the patients letting go of their defenses when faced with the pain and mourning inherent in trauma? the utilization of various defenses and the resulting unresolved mourning reflect the magnitude of the anxiety and pain that is found on the road to mourning. The ability to mourn and the capacity to bear some helplessness while still finding life meaningful are the objectives of the analytic work in this book.

The family are intimately involved in the care of the dying and themselves require support through their experience of both palliative care and bereavement. This volume describes a comprehensive model of family care and how to go about it - an approach which is new, preventive, cost effective and with proven benefits to the bereaved.;The book has been designed rather like a therapy manual, providing a step-by-step approach to assessment and intervention. Its rich illustration through many clinical examples brings the process of therapy alive for the reader, anticipating the common challenges that arise and describing how the therapist might respond. Families are recognised throughout as a central social unit, pivotal to the success of palliative care. This title should be of use to doctors, nurses, psychologists, social workers, pastoral care workers, psychiatrists and other allied health professionals who work in caring for the dying and for their bereaved relatives. Based soundly on a decade of internationally regarded research, this book will alter the direction of future medical practice and is destined to become a classic in its field.

Suicide attacks have become the defining act of political violence of our age. From New York City to Baghdad, from Sri Lanka to Israel, few can doubt that they are a pervasive and terrifying feature of an increasing number of violent conflicts. Since 1981, approximately thirty organizations throughout the world - some of them secular and others affiliated to radical Islam - have carried out more than 500 suicide missions. Although a tiny fraction of the overall number of guerrilla and terrorist attacks occurring in the same period, the results have proved infinitely more lethal. This book is the first to shed real light on these extraordinary acts, and provide answers to the questions we all ask. Are these the actions of aggressive religious zealots and unbridled, irrational radicals or is there a logic driving those behind them? Are their motivations religious or has Islam provided a language to express essentially political causes? How can the perpetrators remain so lucidly effective in the face of certain death? And do these disparate attacks have something like a common cause? For more than two years, this team of internationally distinguished scholars has pursued an unprejudiced inquiry, investigating organizers and perpetrators alike of this extraordinary social phenomenon. Close comparisons between a whole range of cases raise challenging further questions: If suicide missions are so effective, why are they not more common? If killing is what matters, why not stick to 'ordinary' violent means? Or, if dying is what matters, why kill in the process? Making Sense of Suicide Missions contains a wealth of original information and cutting-edge analysis which furthers our understanding of this chilling feature of the contemporary world in radically new and unexpected ways.

Wars in the industrial age kill large numbers of people. What do societies involved in these conflicts do with all the corpses? How do they show them respect? How do they dispose of them? What is their attitude to the bodies of the enemies? In the 19th century, those who died on the battlefield were pushed into mass graves, their identities unknown. Today, their remains are held in such high esteem that they are tracked down in order that last respects might be paid. As a historical account of the way in which war and death intersect, this book describes the complex attitude societies have towards death. Lured by the concept of eternal youth, tempted to deny death as well as physical decay, faced with longer life expectancy, we retain the hope of going off to war without loss of life. But does not our own expectation of zero death" imply "more deaths" for the other side?"

Some of the greatest writers in the history of the art-Hart Crane, Ernest Hemingway, Jerzy Kosinski, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Virginia Woolf-all chose to silence themselves by suicide, leaving their families and friends with heartbreak and the world of literature with gaping holes. Their reasons for killing themselves, when known, were varied and, quite often, unreasonable. Some were plagued by depression or self-doubt, and others by frustration and helplessness in a world they could neither change nor tolerate. Profoundly moving and morbidly attractive, Final Drafts is a necessary historical record, biographical treatment, and psychological examination of the authors who left this "cruel world" by their own hands, either instantly or over long periods of relentless self-destructive behavior. It is also a devoted examination of references to suicide in literature, both by those who took their own lives and those who decided to live. Mark Seinfelt has selected many well-known (mostly fiction) writers, from those whose work dates to over a century ago-when the medical community was ill-equipped to deal with substance abuse and depression-to more recent writers such as Kosinski, Michael Dorris, and Eugene Izzi, who have left a puzzled literary community with a sad legacy. Seinfelt reveals that many authors contemplated ending their lives in their work; were obsessed with destroying themselves; were unable-in the case of the Holocaust-to live with the fact that their contemporaries had been killed; believed death to be a freedom from the horrors that forced them to create; and, sometimes, were simply unable to withstand rejection or criticism of their work. Other noted authors discussed in this volume include John Berryman, Ambrose Bierce, Harry Crosby, John Davidson, William Inge, Randall Jarrell, Arthur Koestler, T.E. Lawrence, Primo Levi, Jack London, Jay Anthony Lukas, Tom McHale, Yukio Mishima, Henry de Montherlant, Seth Morgan, George Sterling, Sara Teasdale, Ernst Toller, John Kennedy Toole, Sergey Yesenin, and many others

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 Kübler-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.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1. On the Fear of Death 2. Attitudes Towards Death and Dying 3. First Stage: Denial and Isolation 4. Second Stage: Anger 5. Third Stage: Bargaining 6. Forth Stage: Depression 7. Fifth Stage: Acceptance 8. Hope 9. The Patient’s Family 10. Some Interviews with Terminally Ill Patients 11. Reactions to the Seminar on Death and Dying 12. Therapy with the Terminally Ill

What do Socrates, Hypatia, Giordano Bruno, Thomas More, and Jan Patocka have in common? First, they were all faced one day with the most difficult of choices: stay faithful to your ideas and die or renounce them and stay alive. Second, they all chose to die. Their spectacular deaths have become not only an integral part of their biographies, but they are also inseparable from their work. A death for ideas is a piece of philosophical work in its own right; Socrates may have never written a line, but his death is one of the greatest philosophical best-sellers of all time. Dying for Ideas explores the limit-situation in which philosophers find themselves when the only means of persuasion they can use is their own dying bodies and the public spectacle of their death. Silenced by brute force, they cannot argue anymore and have to turn philosophy into bodily performance. The phenomenology of this unique situation is as fascinating as it has been neglected.In the manner of a dramatic narrative, the book tells the story of the philosopher's encounter with death as seen from several angles: the tradition of philosophy as a way of life; the body as the locus of fundamental human experiences; death of a classical philosophical topic; fear of death as a torturer of philosophical minds; finally, the philosophers' scapegoating and their live performance of a martyr's death, followed by apotheosis and disappearance into myth. While rooted in the history of philosophy, Dying for Ideas is an exercise in challenging and breaking disciplinary boundaries. This is a book about Socrates and Heidegger, but also about Gandhi's fasting unto death and self-immolation as political protest; about Girard and Passolini, and still about self-fashioning and the art of the essay; Boethius and Montaigne are discussed, and so are Bergman's Seventh Seal and Tolstoy's Death of Ivan Ilyich

Before Drucilla Cornell's mother died, she asked her daughter to write a book, "that would bear witness to the dignity of her death" and that "her bridge class would be able to understand." Shortly thereafter, Cornell's mother, who had degenerative disease, decided to claim her right to die. Forceful, honest, and unsentimental, this is the book that Cornell promised to write. The fundamental argument of Between Women and Generations is that all women have dignity: we must ensure that they have the conditions under which they can claim that dignity in their own lives; even if they are physically harmed or morally wronged, their dignity cannot be lost. Cornell uses the personal as a springboard to discuss contemporary issues concerning women today. She engages with the difficult nature of intergenerational relationships between women by writing about her relationship to her own mother. In telling the story of her adoption of Sarita Graciela Kellow Cornell, her Paraguayan daughter, and of her relationship with UNITY, a cooperative of house cleaners in Long island, New York, Cornelll creates a powerful picture of the legacies of dignity between women and generations.

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.

In this fascinating new book, Vincent Henry (a 21-year veteran of the NYPD who recently retired to become a university professor) explores the psychological transformations and adaptations that result from police officers' encounters with death. Police can encounter death frequently in the course of their duties, and these encounters may range from casual contacts with the deaths of others to the most profound and personally consequential confrontations with their own mortality. Using the 'survivor psychology' model as its theoretical base, this insightful and provocative research ventures into a previously unexplored area of police psychology to illuminate and explore the new modes of adaptation, thought, and feeling that result from various types of death encounters in police work.
The psychology of survival asserts that the psychological world of the survivor--one who has come in close physical or psychic contact with death but nevertheless managed to live--is characterized by five themes: psychic numbing, death guilt, the death imprint, suspicion of counterfeit nurturance, and the struggle to make meaning. These themes become manifest in the survivor's behavior, permeating his or her lifestyle and worldview.
Drawing on extensive interviews with police officers in five nominal categories--rookie officers, patrol sergeants, crime scene technicians, homicide detectives, and officers who survived a mortal combat situation in which an assailant or another officer died--Henry identifies the impact such death encounters have upon the individual, the police organization, and the occupational culture of policing. He has produced a comprehensive and highly textured interpretation ofpolice psychology and police behavior, bolstered by the unique insights that come from his personal experience as an officer, his intimate familiarity with the subtleties and nuances of the police culture's value and belief systems, and his meticulous research and rigorous method. Death Work provides a unique prism through which to view the individual, organizational, and social dynamics of contemporary urban policing. With a foreword by Robert Jay Lifton and a chapter devoted to the local police response to the World Trade Center attacks, Death Work will be of interest to psychologists and criminal justice experts, as well as police officers eager to gain insight into their unique relationship to death.

Over a decade ago the field of bioethics was established in response to the increased control over the design of living organisms afforded by both medical genetics and biotechnology. Since its introduction, bioethics has become established as an academic discipline with journals and professional societies, is covered regularly in the media, and affects people everyday around the globe. In response to the increasing need for information about medical genetics and biotechnology as well as the ethical issues these fields raise, Sheed & Ward proudly presents the Readings in Bioethics Series. Edited by Thomas A. Shannon, the series provides anthologies of critical essays and reflections by leading ethicists in four pivotal areas: reproductive technologies, genetic technologies, death and dying, and health care policy. The goal of this series is twofold: first, to provide a set of readers on thematic topics for introductory or survey courses in bioethics or for courses with a particular theme or time limitation. Second, each of the readers in this series is designed to help students focus more thoroughly and effectively on specific topics that flesh out the ethical issues at the core of bioethics. The series is also highly accessible to general readers interested in bioethics. This volume collects critical essays by leading scholars on the definition of death, consciousness, quality of life, tube feeding, pallative care, physician-assisted suicide and the debate on euthanasia. Included in this volume are works by Paul B. Bascom, David DeGrazia, Ezekiel J. Emanuel, Kathleen Foley, Herbert Hendin, Michael Panicola, Stephen G. Post, Thomas A. Shannon, Charles F. von Gunten, Susan W. Tolle.

Winner of the 2020 Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing Nearly 1,600 Americans are still unaccounted for and presumed dead from the Vietnam War. These are the stories of those who mourn and continue to search for them. For many families the Vietnam War remains unsettled. Nearly 1,600 Americans-and more than 300,000 Vietnamese-involved in the conflict are still unaccounted for. In What Remains, Sarah E. Wagner tells the stories of America's missing service members and the families and communities that continue to search for them. From the scientists who work to identify the dead using bits of bone unearthed in Vietnamese jungles to the relatives who press government officials to find the remains of their loved ones, Wagner introduces us to the men and women who seek to bring the missing back home. Through their experiences she examines the ongoing toll of America's most fraught war. Every generation has known the uncertainties of war. Collective memorials, such as the Tomb of the Unknowns in Arlington National Cemetery, testify to the many service members who never return, their fates still unresolved. But advances in forensic science have provided new and powerful tools to identify the remains of the missing, often from the merest trace-a tooth or other fragment. These new techniques have enabled military experts to recover, repatriate, identify, and return the remains of lost service members. So promising are these scientific developments that they have raised the expectations of military families hoping to locate their missing. As Wagner shows, the possibility of such homecomings compels Americans to wrestle anew with their memories, as with the weight of their loved ones' sacrifices, and to reevaluate what it means to wage war and die on behalf of the nation.

Winner of the 2020 Stand-Out Graduate Research Award Winner of the August 2020 Fonds de recherche du Quebec - Societe et culture (FRQSC) Prix Releve etoile Paul-Gerin-Lajoie Photographic portraits of those who have passed have the potential to become valuable sites of remembrance. Across North America and Western Europe, parents are increasingly unfamiliar with death; lacking the rituals and tools that have historically eased the bereavement process. This book shines a light on how semi-private social media groups enable the bereaved parents of today to navigate their grief in the modern world. The author explores how creative, and sometimes contested, incorporations of photography within these online spaces demonstrate a revival and renegotiation of historic practices. By shining a light on recurrent tendencies and their evolution within new media this book offers an opportunity to observe the complex relationships grief can prompt some individuals to form with the portraits of absent loved ones. As social networking sites continue to enable the reinsertion of death within the social realm, the author looks ahead: might we begin to see a revival and increased openness towards end-of-life, post-mortem and funerary photography? As bereavement increasingly becomes something communicated in an online context, what new types of embellishments to the photographic portrait might we encounter?

"I tremble to say there's good in death, because I've looked in the eyes of the grieving mother and I've seen the heartbreak of the stricken widow, but I've also seen something more in death, something good. Death's hands aren't all bony and cold."-from Confessions of a Funeral Director We are a people who deeply fear death. While humans are biologically wired to evade death for as long as possible, we have become too adept at hiding from it, vilifying it, and-when it can be avoided no longer-letting the professionals take over. Sixth-generation funeral director Caleb Wilde understands this reticence and fear. He had planned to get as far away from the family business as possible. He wanted to make a difference in the world, and how could he do that if all the people he worked with were . . . dead? Slowly, he discovered that caring for the deceased and their loved ones was making a difference-in other people's lives to be sure, but it also seemed to be saving his own. A spirituality of death began to emerge as he observed: * The family who lovingly dressed their deceased father for his burial * The act of embalming a little girl that offered a gift back to her grieving family * The nursing home that honored a woman's life by standing in procession as her body was taken away * The funeral that united a conflicted community Through stories like these, told with equal parts humor and poignancy, Wilde offers an intimate look into the business and a new perspective on living and dying.

Though considered by devotees to be perhaps the most potent expression of religious faith, dying for one's God is also one of the most difficult concepts for modern observers of religion to understand. This is especially true in the West, where martyrdom has all but disapeared and martyrs in other cultures are often viewed skeptically and dismissed as fanatics. This book seeks to foster a greater understanding of these acts of religious devotion by explaining how martyrdom has historically been viewed in the world's major religions. It provides the first sustained, cross-cultural examination of this fascinating aspect of religious life. Spanning 4000 years of history and ranging from Saul in the Hebrew Bible to Sati immolations in present-day India, this book provides a wealth of insight into an often noted but rarely understood cultural phenomenon.

"How do older women come to terms with widowhood? Are they vulnerable or courageous, predictable or creative in dealing with this life challenge?"

Most books about widows usually focus on younger women; this book interweaves the voices of older widows their experiences and insights to show how they have come to terms with widowhood and have recreated their lives in new, unsuspected ways. The widows speak about how they relate to their children, their friends, to men. With powerful emotions they describe their husbands' final illnesses and deaths, and the challenging early days of widowhood. Disputing stereotypes about older women and widows, "The Widowed Self" allows the reader to visualize the impact of losing one's life partner and offers a new way of thinking about widowhood.

This new book by Deborah Kestin van den Hoonaard fills a void in previous work on widowhood. Rather than seeing these women as unfortunate, passive victims of life, the reader will come to appreciate the strength and creativity with which these women face one of life's greatest challenges, a challenge that affects more than half of all women over the age of sixty-five.

Widows and their families, scholars, social workers and other professionals who work with older adults will all be interested in reading "The Widowed Self: The Older Woman's Journey through Widowhood."

"Some guys don't break any rules. They do their jobs, they go to school, they don't commit any infractions, they keep their cells clean and tidy, and they follow the rules. And usually those are our LWOPs [life without parole]. They're usually our easiest keepers." Too Easy to Keep directs much-needed attention toward a neglected group of American prisoners-the large and growing population of inmates serving life sentences. Drawing on extensive interviews with lifers and with prison staff, Too Easy to Keep charts the challenges that a life sentence poses-both to the prisoners and to the staffers charged with caring for them. Surprisingly, many lifers show remarkable resilience and craft lives of notable purpose. Yet their eventual decline will pose challenges to the institutions that house them. Rich in data, Too Easy to Keep illustrates the harsh consequences of excessive sentences and demonstrates a keen need to reconsider punishment policy.

A comprehensive assessment of the field of Disability Studies that presents beyond the medical to dig into the meaning From public transportation and education to adequate access to buildings, the social impact of disability has been felt everywhere since the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990. And a remarkable groundswell of activism and critical literature has followed in this wake. Claiming Disability is the first comprehensive examination of Disability Studies as a field of inquiry. Disability Studies is not simply about the variations that exist in human behavior, appearance, functioning, sensory acuity, and cognitive processing but the meaning we make of those variations. With vivid imagery and numerous examples, Simi Linton explores the divisions society creates-the normal versus the pathological, the competent citizen versus the ward of the state. Map and manifesto, Claiming Disability overturns medicalized versions of disability and establishes disabled people and their allies as the rightful claimants to this territory.

Suicide haunts our literature and our culture, claiming the lives of ordinary people and celebrities alike. It is now the third leading cause of death for fifteen- to twenty-four-year-olds in the United States, raising alarms across the nation about the rising tide of hopelessness seen in our young people. It is a taboo subtext to our successes and our happiness, a dark issue that is often euphemized, avoided, and little understood. In our century, psychology and psychiatry alike have attempted to understand, prevent, and medicalize these phenomena. But they have failed, argues Dr. Edwin Shneidman, because they have lost sight of the plain language, the ordinary everyday words, the pain and frustrated psychological needs of the suicidal individual. In The Suicidal Mind, Dr. Shneidman has written a groundbreaking work for every person who has ever thought about suicide or knows anybody who has contemplated it. The book brims with insight into the suicidal impulse and with helpful suggestions on how to counteract it. Shneidman presents a bold and simple premise: the main cause of suicide is psychological pain or "psychache." Thus the key to preventing suicide is not so much the study of the structure of the brain, or the study of social statistics, or the study of mental diseases, as it is the direct study of human emotions. To treat a suicidal individual, we need to identify, address, and reduce the individual's psychache. Shneidman shares with the reader his knowledge, both as a clinician and researcher, of the psychological drama that plays itself out in the suicidal mind through the exploration of three moving case studies. We meet Ariel, who set herself on fire; Beatrice, who cut herself with the intent to die; and Castro, a young man who meant to shoot his brains out but survived, horribly disfigured. These cases are presented in the person's own words to reveal the details of the suicidal drama, to show that the purpose of suicide is to seek a solution, to illustrate the pain at the core of suicide, and to isolate the common stressor in suicide: frustrated psychological needs. Throughout, Shneidman offers practical, explicit maneuvers to assist in treating a suicidal individual--steps that can be taken by concerned friends or family and professionals alike. Suicide is an exclusively human response to extreme psychological pain, a lonely and desperate solution for the sufferer who can no longer see any alternatives. In this landmark and elegantly written book, Shneidman provides the language, not only for understanding the suicidal mind, but for understanding ourselves. Anyone who has ever considered suicide, or knows someone who has, will find here a wealth of insights to help understand and to prevent suicide.

"A compulsively readable, totally unforgettable memoir that recounts a sensitive college student's experience working on an emergency ambulance in hell, aka New York City." -- James Patterson In 1967, Mike Scardino was an eighteen year-old pre-med student with a problem - his parents couldn't afford to pay his college tuition. Luckily, Mike's dad hooked him up with a lucrative, albeit unusual, summer job, one he's never forgotten. Bad Call is Mike's visceral, fast-moving, and mordantly funny account of the summers he spent working as an "ambulance attendant" on the mean streets of late 1960s New York, at a time when emergency medicine looked nothing like it does today. Fueled by adrenaline and Sabrett's hot dogs, he crossed third rails to pick up injured trainmen, encountered a woman attacked by rats, attended to victims of a plane crash at JFK airport, was nearly murdered, and got an early and indelible education in the impermanence of life. But his work also afforded moments of rare beauty, hope, and everyday heroism, and it changed the course of Mike's life as well as the way he saw the world. Action-packed, poignant, and rich with details that bring Mike's world to life, Bad Call is a gritty portrait of a bygone era as well as a thrilling tale of one man's coming of age.

There are strongly pronounced differentials between survival chances for different social classes in less developed countries. This book gives insight into the variety of factors - biological, social, economic and cultural - associated with these inequalities in mortality rates. Certain of the papers deal with new conceptual approaches and methodological issues, while others address particular countries in Asia and Latin America, providing overall an important and provoking study of inequality in death. This book should interest academics and graduate students in demography (especially those specializing in mortality studies), as well as policy-makers, commentators and professionals in the areas of public health, public administration, social policy and epidemiology.