The Routledge History of Death Since 1800 looks at how death has been treated and dealt with in modern history – the history of the past 250 years – in a global context, through a mix of definite, ...often quantifiable changes and a complex, qualitative assessment of the subject.
The book is divided into three parts, with the first considering major trends in death history and identifying widespread patterns of change and continuity in the material and cultural features of death since 1800. The second part turns to specifically regional experiences, and the third offers more specialized chapters on key topics in the modern history of death. Historical findings and debates feed directly into a current and prospective assessment of death, as many societies transition into patterns of ageing that will further alter the death experience and challenge modern reactions. Thus, a final chapter probes this topic, by way of introducing the links between historical experience and current trajectories, ensuring that the book gives the reader a framework for assessing the ongoing process, as well as an understanding of the past.
Global in focus and linking death to a variety of major developments in modern global history, the volume is ideal for all those interested in the multifaceted history of how death has been dealt with in different societies over time and who want access to the rich and growing historiography on the subject.
A study of the depictions of women's executions in Renaissance England A Weak Woman in a Strong Battle: Women and Public Execution in Early Modern England provides critical insights on ...representations of women on the scaffold, focusing on how female victims and those writing about them constructed meaning from the ritual. Jennifer Lodine-Chaffey draws on a wide range of genres, from accounts of martyrdom to dramatic works, to explore not only the words of women executed in Tudor and Stuart England, but also the ways that writers represented female bodies as markers of penitence or deviance.A significant part of the execution spectacle-one used to assess the victim's proper acceptance of death and godly repentance-was the final speech offered at the foot of the gallows or before the pyre. To ensure their final words held value for audiences, women adopted conventionally gendered language and positioned themselves as subservient and modest. The reception of women's speeches, Lodine-Chaffey argues, depended on their performances of accepted female behaviors and language as well as physical signs of interior regeneration. Indeed, when women presented themselves or were represented as behaving in stereotypically feminine and virtuous ways, they were able to offer limited critiques of their fraught positions in society.Just as important as their words, though, were the depictions of women's bodies. The executed woman's body, Lodine-Chaffey contends, functioned as a text, scrutinized by witnesses and readers for markers of innocence or guilt. The intense focus on the words and bodies of women facing execution during this period, Lodine-Chaffey argues, became a catalyst for a more thorough interest in and understanding of women's roles not just as criminals but as subjects
The body economic Gallagher, Catherine
2006., 20090110, 2009, 2005, 2006-01-01
eBook
The Body Economic revises the intellectual history of nineteenth-century Britain by demonstrating that political economists and the writers who often presented themselves as their literary ...antagonists actually held most of their basic social assumptions in common. Catherine Gallagher demonstrates that political economists and their Romantic and early-Victorian critics jointly relocated the idea of value from the realm of transcendent spirituality to that of organic "life," making human sensations--especially pleasure and pain--the sources and signs of that value. Classical political economy, this book shows, was not a mechanical ideology but a form of nineteenth-century organicism, which put the body and its feelings at the center of its theories, and neoclassical economics built itself even more self-consciously on physiological premises. The Body Economic explains how these shared views of life, death, and sensation helped shape and were modified by the two most important Victorian novelists: Charles Dickens and George Eliot. It reveals how political economists interacted crucially with the life sciences of the nineteenth century--especially with psychophysiology and anthropology--producing the intellectual world that nurtured not only George Eliot's realism but also turn-of-the-century literary modernism.
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? InThe 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 Deadoffers 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.
Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions.
Sudden Death in Opera Trimble, Michael; Letellier, Robert Ignatius; Hesdorffer, Dale
2021
eBook
An aspect of dying in opera, rarely observed or commented on, is Sudden Unexpected Death. There are many deaths in this melodramatic genre: most follow expected causes like murder, suicide, or old ...age. This book explores those deaths which occur without obvious natural causes. These are often central to the overall drama of the opera, representing denouements forming the epiphany of the story and the apotheosis for the audience. The book identifies 50 operas where such events occur, exploring the role of the dramatis personae, the circumstances of their dying, and specific themes that emerge. These include a preponderance of females, especially in the 19th century, who die mainly at the end of the operas, often in the context of tragedy. It charts the growing awareness in the medical sciences of the unconscious forces driving human behaviour, including liminal mental states and trances, which influenced these operas and continue to affect human behaviour to the present day. In addition, the changing philosophies that are intertwined with operatic narratives, in particular stemming from Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, are important in the book's exegesis, as is the special role of Wagner's compositions. This leads to the exploration of recurrent concepts such as the Liebestod, the ewig Weibliche and redemption itself.
Precisely tracking childhood death Farag, Tamer H; Koplan, Jeffery P; Breiman, Robert F ...
The American journal of tropical medicine and hygiene,
06/2017
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Little is known about the specific causes of neonatal and
under-five childhood death in high-mortality geographic regions
due to a lack of primary data and dependence on inaccurate
tools, such as ...verbal autopsy. To meet the ambitious new
Sustainable Development Goal 3.2 to eliminate preventable child
mortality in every country, better approaches are needed to
precisely determine specific causes of death so that prevention
and treatment interventions can be strengthened and focused.
Minimally invasive tissue sampling (MITS) is a technique that
uses needle-based postmortem sampling, followed by advanced
histopathology and microbiology to definitely determine cause of
death. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is supporting a
new surveillance system called the Child Health and Mortality
Prevention Surveillance network, which will determine cause of
death using MITS in combination with other information, and
yield cause-specific population-based mortality rates,
eventually in up to 12-15 sites in sub-Saharan Africa and south
Asia. However, the Gates Foundation funding alone is not enough.
We call on governments, other funders, and international
stakeholders to expand the use of pathology-based cause of death
determination to provide the information needed to end
preventable childhood mortality.
Le Testament est un moyen de transfert du patrimoine de de cujus aux héritiers. À un certain moment de la vie, tous nous sommes confrontés directement ou indirectement au problème de testament .Tout ...au long de cette réflexion, nous avons essayé de dégager les pesanteurs culturelles qui justifient la problématique de la pratique du testament à Lubumbashi d’une part, il faut rédiger le testament pour protéger sa famille et d’autre part il faut évoquer sa mort, ce qui est sujet tabou dans la culture africaine. La compréhension et l’explication de cette double contrainte communicationnelle nous ont renvoyé à l’approche semio-contextuelle qui s’intéresse à la construction des significations pour les acteurs. Cette recherche a pour but de souligner le paradoxe auquel les congolais sont confrontés dans la pratique testamentaire.
About 30 percent of hospice patients report a "visitation" by
someone who is not there, a phenomenon known in end-of-life care as
a deathbed vision. These visions can be of dead friends or family
...members and occur on average three days before death. Strikingly,
individuals from wildly diverse geographic regions and
religions-from New York to Japan to Moldova to Papua New
Guinea-report similar visions. Appearances of our dead during
serious illness, crises, or bereavement are as old as the
historical record. But in recent years, we have tended to explain
them in either the fantastical terms of the supernatural or the
reductive terms of neuroscience. This book is about how, when, and
why our dead visit us. Allan Kellehear-a medical sociologist and
expert on death, dying, and palliative care-has gathered data and
conducted studies on these experiences across cultures. He also
draws on the long-neglected work of early anthropologists who
developed cultural explanations about why the dead visit. Deathbed
visions conform to the rituals that underpin basic social relations
and expectations-customs of greeting, support, exchange,
gift-giving, and vigils-because the dead must communicate with us
in a social language that we recognize. Kellehear emphasizes the
personal consequences for those who encounter these visions,
revealing their significance for how the dying person makes meaning
of their experiences. Providing vital understanding of a widespread
yet mysterious phenomenon, Visitors at the End of Life
offers insights for palliative care professionals, researchers, and
the bereaved.
Les textes rassemblés dans cet ouvrage abordent la mort, ses significations au fil du temps, ainsi que ses limites, tant physiques que métaphysiques. Que pouvons-nous encore dire de la mort au XXIe ...siècle ? Que nous dit le rapport des époques passées à la mort sur les liens que nous entretenons aujourd’hui avec elle ? Quel sens pouvons-nous attribuer à la souffrance qu’elle fait naître ? Que nous est-il permis d’espérer et comment nous est-il possible de l’apprivoiser, lorsqu’elle surgit concrètement dans nos vies ? Nous vivons dans une société où la réalité de la mort est désymbolisée et niée, pour ne pas dire dénuée de sens face aux mœurs et aux politiques actuelles, centrées autour du désir de repousser toujours plus loin les limites de la finitude humaine. Réfléchir aujourd’hui au sens à donner à la mort, en utilisant les outils que nous fournissent différentes sciences, nous permet paradoxalement de vivre plus pleinement notre vie.
