A day in the life of Carla Valentine - curator, pathology technician and 'death professional' - is not your average day. She spent ten years training and working as an Anatomical Pathology Technologist: where the mortuary slab was her desk, and that day's corpses her task list. Past Mortems tells Carla's stories of those years, as well as investigating the body alongside our attitudes towards death - shedding light on what the living can learn from dead and the toll the work can take on the living souls who carry it out. Fascinating and insightful, Past Mortems reveals the truth about what happens when the mortuary doors swing shut or the lid of the coffin closes ...

The book Approaches to Death and Dying: Bioethical and Cultural Perspectives, edited by Marta Szabat and Jan Piasecki, is part of a still too narrow catalogue of works devoted to end-of-life themes. The volume consists of eleven articles arranged in four parts corresponding to a broad range of issues: law, ethics, philosophy, and cultural studies. The arrangement of the book is thus constructed around various perspectives upon which any reflection on death and dying must be based. This is perhaps indicative of how difficult it is to adopt an unambiguous attitude towards death-modernity, which introduces a multitude of possible choices and decisions regarding our own bodies, has enhanced individualism but at the same time done away with the order provided by old customs, cultural arrangements, strategies towards the inevitable and the power exerted by that order.

Sabarl island--created, in myth, from the bones of a serpent--is a coral atoll in the Louisiade archipelago of Papua New Guinea. The Sabarl speak of themselves as true islanders: persons separated from the means of both physical and social survival. The Sabarl struggle for continuity--of the physical and social person and of social relations, of cultureal values, of paternal influence in a matrilineal society--is the subject of Debbora Battaglia's sensitive ethnography of loss and reconstruction: the first major work on cultural responses to mortality in the southern Massim culture area and an important contribution to studies of personhood in Melanesia. The creative focus of Sabarl cultural life is a series of mortuary feasts and rituals known as segaiya. In assembling and disassembling commemorative food and objects in segaiya exchanges, Sabarl also assemble and disassemble the critical social relations such objects stand for. These commemorative acts create a collective memory yet also a collective experience of forgetting social bonds that are of no future use to the living. Sabarl anticipate this disaggregation in patterns of everyday life, which reveal the importance of categorical distinctions mapped in beliefs about the physical and metaphysical person. Using remembrance and forgetting as an analytic lens, Battaglia is able to ask questions critical to understanding Melanesian social process. One of the new ethnographies addressing the limits of ethnographic representation and the fragmented nature of knowledge from an indigenous perspective, her finely wrought study explores the dynamics of cultural practices in which decontruction is integral to construction, allowing a new perspective on the ephermeral nature of sociality in Melanesia and new insight into the efficacy of cultural images more generally.

The contributors to Passages and Afterworlds explore death and its rituals across the Caribbean, drawing on ethnographic theories shaped by a deep understanding of the region's long history of violent encounters, exploitation, and cultural diversity. Examining the relationship between living bodies and the spirits of the dead, the contributors investigate the changes in cosmologies and rituals in the cultural sphere of death in relation to political developments, state violence, legislation, policing, and identity politics. Contributors address topics that range from the ever-evolving role of divinized spirits in Haiti and the contemporary mortuary practice of Indo-Trinidadians to funerary ceremonies in rural Jamaica and ancestor cults in Maroon culture in Suriname. Questions of alterity, difference, and hierarchy underlie these discussions of how racial, cultural, and class differences have been deployed in ritual practice and how such rituals have been governed in the colonial and postcolonial Caribbean. Contributors. Donald Cosentino, Maarit Forde, Yanique Hume, Paul Christopher Johnson, Aisha Khan, Keith E. McNeal, George Mentore, Richard Price, Karen Richman, Ineke (Wilhelmina) van Wetering, Bonno (H.U.E.) Thoden van Velzen

A major contribution to debates about the value of death and its place in Western and Eastern religions is presented by this work's belief that religious and secular attitudes can support and reinforce one another through their attitudes towards death.

A mass fatalities response goes far beyond returning the remains of a loved one to surviving family members. Those charged with this grim but critical responsibility will find themselves immersed in multiple tasks involving diverse individuals, organizations, and priorities. Mass Fatalities: Managing the Community Response examines multiple complex issues while providing practical guidance to communities and responders as they plan for, respond to, and recover from a mass fatalities incident. This book explores the immense array of tasks such as: Managing resources and personnel Protecting a potential crime scene Conducting a comprehensive search and recovery of the remains Identifying and returning the remains and personal effects Ensuring family members of the deceased are treated with compassion, dignity, and respect Making sure responders have the proper tools to complete their responsibilities Providing family members, responders, and the impacted community the necessary support to cope with the physical, spiritual, and emotional stressors of a mass fatalities incident The book explains in detail the functions performed at the mass fatalities operational sites, including the Disaster Site, Victim Identification Center, Family Assistance Center, and Staff Processing Center. It provides organizational charts with job descriptions detailing the roles and responsibilities for an effective leadership team and describes the management of the disaster site, presenting step-by-step procedures for search and recovery. The book also discusses the registration, initial interview, and Notification of Death for family members at the Family Assistance Center and covers best practices for the Victim Identification Center operations. Throughout, chapters emphasize the need for mental health services-exploring the essential elements of providing effective and compassionate support to surviving family members (including children), to responders and their families, and to the community. An increase in catastrophic disasters in recent years has highlighted the need for sound guidance outlining the protocol for handling these events. Mass Fatalities: Managing the Community Response is an indispensable resource for this formidable task. Peter Teahen discusses the book in a video on the CRC Press YouTube channel.

The meaning of our concern for mortal remains-from antiquity through the twentieth century The Greek philosopher Diogenes said that when he died his body should be tossed over the city walls for beasts to scavenge. Why should he or anyone else care what became of his corpse? In The Work of the Dead, acclaimed cultural historian Thomas Laqueur examines why humanity has universally rejected Diogenes's argument. No culture has been indifferent to mortal remains. Even in our supposedly disenchanted scientific age, the dead body still matters-for individuals, communities, and nations. A remarkably ambitious history, The Work of the Dead offers a compelling and richly detailed account of how and why the living have cared for the dead, from antiquity to the twentieth century. The book draws on a vast range of sources-from mortuary archaeology, medical tracts, letters, songs, poems, and novels to painting and landscapes in order to recover the work that the dead do for the living: making human communities that connect the past and the future. Laqueur shows how the churchyard became the dominant resting place of the dead during the Middle Ages and why the cemetery largely supplanted it during the modern period. He traces how and why since the nineteenth century we have come to gather the names of the dead on great lists and memorials and why being buried without a name has become so disturbing. And finally, he tells how modern cremation, begun as a fantasy of stripping death of its history, ultimately failed-and how even the ashes of the victims of the Holocaust have been preserved in culture. A fascinating chronicle of how we shape the dead and are in turn shaped by them, this is a landmark work of cultural history.

Never before available in paperback, J. M. C. Toynbee's study is the most comprehensive book on Roman burial practices. Ranging throughout the Roman world from Rome to Pompeii, Britain to Jerusalem--Toynbee's book examines funeral practices from a wide variety of perspectives. First, Toynbee examines Roman beliefs about death and the afterlife, revealing that few Romans believed in the Elysian Fields of poetic invention. She then describes the rituals associated with burial and mourning: commemorative meals at the gravesite were common, with some tombs having built-in kitchens and rooms where family could stay overnight. Toynbee also includes descriptions of the layout and finances of cemeteries, the tomb types of both the rich and poor, and the types of grave markers and monuments as well as tomb furnishings.

Help and Hope for an Unexpected JourneyDo real Christians commit suicide? Yes, they do. And for those left behind, the journey following such a tragedy is unbearably painful. Finding Your Way after the Suicide of Someone You Love is a compassionate and practical guide that addresses the intensely personal issues of survivors of suicide (SOS). This gentle and faith-affirming resource helps survivors know what to expect, especially during the first year following a suicide. It includes personal stories of survivors and suggestions on how to move beyond survival to live life again. Designed for use by individuals, couples, and SOS groups, this book offers help for parents, siblings, friends, and extended families, as well as practical guidelines for pastors, Christian counselors, and other church leaders. Topics include: * What to do in the immediate aftermath of a suicide* Handling guilt and understanding the role of depression in suicides * Dealing with questions of faith and meaning * Creating a support system* Choosing a Christian therapist* Trusted resources and websites

The first book length anthropological study of voluntary assisted dying in Switzerland, Leaving is a narrative account of five people who ended their lives with assistance. Stavrianakis places his observations of the judgment to end life in this way within a larger inquiry about how to approach and understand the practice of assisted suicide, which he characterizes as operating in a political, legal, and medical "parazone," adjacent to medical care and expertise. Frequently, observers too rapidly integrate assisted suicide into moral positions that reflect sociological and psychological commonplaces about individual choice and its social determinants. Leaving engages with core early twentieth-century psychoanalytic and sociological texts arguing for a contemporary approach to the phenomenon of voluntary death, seeking to learn from such conceptual repertoires, as well as to acknowledge their limits. Leaving concludes on the anthropological question of how to account for the ethics of assistance with suicide: to grasp the actuality and composition of the ethical work that goes on in the configuration of a subject, one who is making a judgment about dying, with other participants and observers, the anthropologist included.

On June 28, 1987, four Dallas-based Christian leaders were killed in an airplane crash as they were returning from a Focus on the Family retreat in Montana: George L. Clark, chairman of the board and CEO of MBank; Dr. Trevor E. Mabery, a surgeon who helped found Humana Hospital-Medical City; Hugo W. Schoelkopf III, an entrepreneur and sporting goods manufacturer; and Creath Davis, founder and director of Christian Concern Foundation.

Among the losses their families shared, Creath's wife, Verdell, also lost part of her identity: No longer was she a pastor's wife, and no longer was she sure what she believed. This deeply moving book, gleaned from parts of journals that she kept during the loss of her husband, offers a source of hope and healing for anyone experiencing grief. With remarkable honesty, courage, and generosity, she shares how to examine grief and ultimately find healing in the process.

In this interfaith book Lucinda Mosher investigates different understandings of destiny, loss, death, and remembrance in America's many religions. Using stories and interviews with a variety of religious adherents and health professionals, the book wrestles with questions such as: how can our religion guide us in making decisions about certain kinds of medical treatment options? What religion-related issues would it be helpful for a healthcare provider to know? How do different religious traditions help manage our grief? In a globalized society religious traditions sit alongside each other as never before, and the need for religious literacy and multifaith chaplaincy is increasingly recognized. By looking at multireligious America, this book provides an essential exploration of different attitudes to death, helping members of all faith communities to become more literate with each other's religious traditions.

Book & CD-ROM. International comparisons of mortality aimed at revealing age-specific and time-specific differences in survival between Denmark and nine developed countries have been carried out by estimating surfaces of ratios of death rates in the last decades. To gain deeper insights into this phenomenon comparative analyses of death rates by causes of death for Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Japan have been performed. The book is accompanied by a CD-ROM including colour Lexis maps, graphs of trends in death rates by causes of death, animated graphs of common survival indicators and a Lexis program for producing Lexis maps.

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

"Pet Loss and Human Bereavement" deals with the human/companion animal relationship and what happens when that bond is broken. The contributors to the book acknowledge the significance o the relationship and the grief involved when a pet dies or is terminally ill. The contributors' approach covers multidisciplinary care that can be given by veterinarians, psychiatrists, social workers, philosopher-ethicists, and others.

Topics include guidance for dealing with owners of terminally ill or recently deceased animals; the rights of animals to humane treatment; and the right of owners to find acceptance of their bereavement, respect for their emotional ties to their pets, and positive resolution of their grief.

Breaking Free from Death examines how Russian writers respond to the burden of living with anxieties about their creative outputs, and, ultimately, about their own inevitable finitude. What contributes to creative death are not just crippling diseases that make man defenseless in the face of death, and not just the arguably universal fear of death but, equally important, the innumerable impositions on the part of various outsiders. Many conflicts in the lives of Rylkova's subjects arose not from their opposition to the existing political regimes but from their interactions with like-minded and supporting intellectuals, friends, and relatives. The book describes the lives and choices that concrete individuals and-by extrapolation-their literary characters must face in order to preserve their singularity and integrity while attempting to achieve fame, greatness, and success.

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 elaborate and inventive slaughter of humans and animals in the arena fed an insatiable desire for violent spectacle among the Roman people. Donald G. Kyle combines the words of ancient authors with current scholarly research and cross-cultural perspectives, as he explores
* the origins and historical development of the games
* who the victims were and why they were chosen
* how the Romans disposed of the thousands of resulting corpses
* the complex religious and ritual aspects of institutionalised violence
* the particularly savage treatment given to defiant Christians.
This lively and original work provides compelling, sometimes controversial, perspectives on the bloody entertainments of ancient Rome, which continue to fascinate us to this day.