"Fatal Years" is the first systematic study of child mortality in the United States in the late nineteenth century. Exploiting newly discovered data from the 1900 Census of Population, Samuel Preston and Michael Haines present their findings in a volume that is not only a pioneering work of demography but also an accessible and moving historical narrative. Despite having a rich, well-fed, and highly literate population, the United States had exceptionally high child-mortality levels during this period: nearly one out of every five children died before the age of five. Preston and Haines challenge accepted opinion to show that losses in privileged social groups were as appalling as those among lower classes. Improvements came only with better knowledge about infectious diseases and greater public efforts to limit their spread. The authors look at a wide range of topics, including differences in mortality in urban versus rural areas and the differences in child mortality among various immigration groups. "Fatal Years is an extremely important contribution to our understanding of child mortality in the United States at the turn of the century. The new data and its analysis force everyone to reconsider previous work and statements about U.S. mortality in that period. The book will quickly become a standard in the field."--Maris A. Vinovskis, University of Michigan

Originally published in 1991.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

This compelling text and dramatic photographic essay convey the emotional power of the death rituals of a small Greek village--the funeral, the singing of laments, the distribution of food, the daily visits to the graves, and especially the rite of exhumation. These rituals help Greek villagers face the universal paradox of mourning: how can the living sustain relationships with the dead and at the same time bring them to an end, in order to continue to live meaningfully as members of a community? That is the villagers' dilemma, and our own. Thirty-one moving photographs (reproduced in duotone to do justice to their great beauty) combine with vivid descriptions of the bereaved women of "Potamia" and with the words of the funeral laments to allow the reader an unusual emotional identification with the people of rural Greece as they struggle to integrate the experience of death into their daily lives.

Loring M. Danforth's sensitive use of symbolic and structural analysis complements his discussion of the social context in which these rituals occur. He explores important themes in rural Greek life, such as the position of women, patterns of reciprocity and obligation, and the nature of social relations within the family.

With an aging population, declining marriage and childbirth rates, and a rise in single households, more Japanese are living and dying alone. Many dead are no longer buried in traditional ancestral graves where descendants would tend their spirits, and individuals are increasingly taking on mortuary preparation for themselves. In Being Dead Otherwise Anne Allison examines the emergence of new death practices in Japan as the old customs of mortuary care are coming undone. She outlines the proliferation of new industries, services, initiatives, and businesses that offer alternative means---ranging from automated graves, collective gravesites, and crematoria to one-stop mortuary complexes and robotic priests---for tending to the dead. These new burial and ritual practices provide alternatives to the long-standing traditions of burial and commemoration of the dead. In charting this shifting ecology of death, Allison outlines the potential of these solutions to radically reorient sociality in Japan in ways that will impact how we think about the end of life, identity, tradition, and culture in Japan and beyond.

The period following the death of a friend or loved one can be tumultuous for anyone, but can be especially difficult for children, with lasting effects if the loss is not acknowledged or supported. This book emphasises the importance of listening to children and helping them to create positive bonds that can sustain them as they go through their lives. It provides practical, creative approaches to support children in their time of bereavement and to those whose loved one is dying. By recognising feelings of pain, anger, and confusion through open and positive discussions, a child is able to build emotional resilience and create enduring memories of the person they have lost. The author explains the importance of developing continuing bonds between children and loved ones in times of bereavement and offers practical ways in which these bonds may be nurtured through creative activities, memory making, and personal storytelling.

How digital technology--from Facebook tributes to QR codes on headstones--is changing our relationship to death.Facebook is the biggest cemetery in the world, with countless acres of cyberspace occupied by snapshots, videos, thoughts, and memories of people who have shared their last status updates. Modern society usually hides death from sight, as if it were a character flaw and not an ineluctable fact. But on Facebook and elsewhere on the internet, we can't avoid death; digital ghosts--electronic traces of the dead--appear at our click or touch. On the Internet at least, death has once again become a topic for public discourse. In Online Afterlives, Davide Sisto considers how digital technology is changing our relationship to death. Sisto describes the various modes of digital survival after biological death--including Facebook tributes, chatbots programmed to speak in the voice of a dead person, and QR codes on headstones--and discusses their philosophical ramifications. Sisto reports on such phenomena as the Tweet Hereafter, a website that collects people's last tweets; the intimacy of sending a WhatsApp message to someone who has died; and digital cremation, the deactivation of a dead person's account. Because we can mingle with the dead online almost as we mingle with the living, he warns, we may find it difficult to distinguish communication at a distance from communication with the dead. The digital afterlife has restored the communal dimension of death, rescuing both mourners and the mourned from social isolation. A society willing to engage with death and mortality, Sisto argues, is a more balanced and mature society.

Why is death bad for us, even on the assumption that it involves the absence of experience? Whom should we save from death if we cannot save everyone? Kamm considers these questions, critically examining some answers other philosophers have given. She also examines specifically what differences between persons are relevant to the distribution of any scarce resources, e.g. bodily organs for transplantation.

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 close look at stories of maternal death in Malawi that considers their implications in the broader arena of medical knowledge. By the early twenty-first century, about one woman in twelve could expect to die of a pregnancy or childbirth complication in Malawi. Specific deaths became object lessons. Explanatory stories circulated through hospitals and villages, proliferating among a range of practitioners: nurse-midwives, traditional birth attendants, doctors, epidemiologists, herbalists. Was biology to blame? Economic underdevelopment? Immoral behavior? Tradition? Were the dead themselves at fault? In Partial Stories, Claire L. Wendland considers these explanations for maternal death, showing how they reflect competing visions of the past and shared concerns about social change. Drawing on extended fieldwork, Wendland reveals how efforts to legitimate a single story as the authoritative version can render care more dangerous than it might otherwise be. Historical, biological, technological, ethical, statistical, and political perspectives on death usually circulate in different expert communities and different bodies of literature. Here, Wendland considers them together, illuminating dilemmas of maternity care in contexts of acute change, chronic scarcity, and endemic inequity within Malawi and beyond.

"The milkman cried when I told him you were dead. 'Last night,' I said, 'Mark died.'" This collection brings together 30 short stories and poems about dying and bereavement. Written by mothers, fathers, daughters, sons, wives, husbands and dying people, these moving pieces talk honestly about how it feels to care for someone who is dying, to grieve for a loved one, and to face death oneself. A candid story about a daughter's relationship with her mother's carer; an internal monologue on dementia; a deeply moving poem about losing a son to cot death; and a heartfelt story about a mother's end of life are some of the poignant pieces included. This collection provides an opportunity to think and talk about death and dying, too often a taboo subject, and offers readers the rare comfort and support of shared experience.

"Kein Antlitz in einem Sarg hat mir je gezeigt, daB der Eben-Verstorbene uns vermiBt. Das Gegenteil davon ist Uberdeutlich . . . Der Verstorbene UberlaBt mich der Erinnerung an meine Erlebnisse mit ihm . . . Er hingegen, der Verstorbene, hat inzwischen eine Erfahrung, die mir erst noch bevorsteht, und die sich nicht ver- mitteln laBt - es geschehe denn durch eine Offenbarung im Glauben. " Aus der Totenrede von Max Frisch fUr Peter Noll Die Ergebnisse einer kulturvergleichenden Analyse zu Sterben und Tod, die sich die 7. Internationale Fachkonferenz Ethnomedizin im April 1984 zur Aufgabe gemacht hatte, werden hier einer breiteren Offentlichkeit zuganglich. Die Beitrage konfrontieren uns mit einer tiberwaltigenden Ftille kultureller Zeugnisse tiber den Umgang mit Sterbenden und tiber die Symbolisierung des Todes. Ungeachtet der un- vermeidlichen Beschranktheit und Zufalligkeit der Auswahl, trotz der in der Sache liegenden Verfremdung wissenschaftlich-methodischer Dar- stellung ftihlt sich der Leser unmittelbar angesprochen, ja, gefes- selt durch die Intensitat, mit der zu allen Zeiten und in allen Kulturen Sterben und Tod kulturell gestaltet, symbolisch gedeutet und im mitmenschlichen Umgang erfahren wurde. DaB uns Menschen Ster- ben und Tod gemeinsam sind, daB jede Zeit, jede Kultur, aber auch jeder einzelne sich dieser anthropologisch gemeinsamen Situation stellen muB, sie ftir sich deuten und verarbeiten muB, dtirfte wohl auf keine andere Weise so sinnfallig und tiberzeugend hervortreten wie in dem hier vorgelegten Tagungsbericht.

The inspiring and powerful book about navigating loss from acclaimed grief coach and New York Times bestselling author Hope Edelman, featuring an exclusive new introduction 'Hope Edelman remains unmatched in perfectly weaving touching personal anecdotes with illuminating scientific data, to remind us we are not alone' Rachel Reichblum, That Good Grief _________ Grief is a path we can all expect to walk one day, when we lose someone we love, and life suddenly looks different. In The Aftergrief, Hope Edelman helps us to understand that loss isn't something to get over, get past, or move beyond. Drawing on her own experiences of early bereavement, as well as interviews with dozens of people who have lost someone dear, The Aftergrief guides us through: * The story of grief * Getting it together * New and old grief * Finding self-expression * Reauthoring your story of loss * Finding continuity Offering advice for processing loss, regaining balance in its wake and even finding new purpose, Edelman reminds us that our sorrow can ebb and flow, recede and return, and this doesn't mean that we're 'doing it wrong.' Above all, The Aftergrief helps us to see that while grieving may be a lifelong process, it needn't be a lifelong struggle. _________ 'An invaluable, outstanding and unique resource laced with empathy, wisdom and constructive ideas for those whose lives have been touched by loss and tragedy' Dr Shelley Gilbert MBE, Founder and President of Grief Encounter and author of Griefbook 'Hope Edelman remains unmatched in perfectly weaving touching personal anecdotes with illuminating scientific data, to remind us we are not alone. The author of the seminal Motherless Daughters continues to be at the forefront of changing how the world understands loss, and The Aftergrief is no exception' Rachel Reichblum of That Good Grief 'In the 1970s the phone rang one Friday afternoon when I was aged thirteen and I was told my mum was dead. If I'd had a road map like this for dealing with grief it would have changed my childhood' Tony Livesey, BBC Radio 5 Live