A Social History of Dying

A Social History of Dying
Author: Allan Kellehear
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 25
Release: 2007-02-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 1139461427

Our experiences of dying have been shaped by ancient ideas about death and social responsibility at the end of life. From Stone Age ideas about dying as otherworld journey to the contemporary Cosmopolitan Age of dying in nursing homes, Allan Kellehear takes the reader on a 2 million year journey of discovery that covers the major challenges we will all eventually face: anticipating, preparing, taming and timing for our eventual deaths. This book, first published in 2007, is a major review of the human and clinical sciences literature about human dying conduct. The historical approach of this book places our recent images of cancer dying and medical care in broader historical, epidemiological and global context. Professor Kellehear argues that we are witnessing a rise in shameful forms of dying. It is not cancer, heart disease or medical science that presents modern dying conduct with its greatest moral tests, but rather poverty, ageing and social exclusion.

Advent of Dying

Advent of Dying
Author: Sister Carol Anne O'Marie
Publisher: Minotaur Books
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2001-11-19
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1429993588

Readers have come to delight in the murder-solving exploits of septuagenarian Sister Mary Helen and her cohort Sister Eileen, two nuns with a nose for nabbing killers. Publishers Weekly calls the Sister Mary Helen Mysteries "refreshingly different" and a "heady mix of humor and suspense." Once you meet this spry, clever sleuth, you'll want to make a habit of reading her adventures again and again. Timid little Suzanne Barnes was the perfect ecclesiastical secretary: efficient, discreet, self-effacing. So it came as a shock when Suzanne invited Sisters Mary Helen, Eileen and Anne to Ghiradelli Square's Sea Wench Bar to hear her belt out the blues. Sister Mary Helen wondered what secrets lay behind those watery blue eyes. The Sea Wench Suzanne was a revelation: sassy, sexy, dressed to kill. It was her first-and last-performance, punctuated by a silver letter opener in the heart. Who killed the canary? Sister Mary Helen and her faithful band must unearth Suzanne's secrets to solve the murder before all hell breaks loose-again...

In My Time of Dying

In My Time of Dying
Author: John Parker
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 412
Release: 2021-03-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 0691214905

An in-depth look at how mortuary cultures and issues of death and the dead in Africa have developed over four centuries In My Time of Dying is the first detailed history of death and the dead in Africa south of the Sahara. Focusing on a region that is now present-day Ghana, John Parker explores mortuary cultures and the relationship between the living and the dead over a four-hundred-year period spanning the seventeenth to twentieth centuries. Parker considers many questions from the African historical perspective, including why people die and where they go after death, how the dead are buried and mourned to ensure they continue to work for the benefit of the living, and how perceptions and experiences of death and the ends of life have changed over time. From exuberant funeral celebrations encountered by seventeenth-century observers to the brilliantly conceived designer coffins of the late twentieth century, Parker shows that the peoples of Ghana have developed one of the world’s most vibrant cultures of death. He explores the unfolding background of that culture through a diverse range of issues, such as the symbolic power of mortal remains and the dominion of hallowed ancestors, as well as the problem of bad deaths, vile bodies, and vengeful ghosts. Parker reconstructs a vast timeline of death and the dead, from the era of the slave trade to the coming of Christianity and colonial rule to the rise of the modern postcolonial nation. With an array of written and oral sources, In My Time of Dying richly adds to an understanding of how the dead continue to weigh on the shoulders of the living.

Attending the Dying

Attending the Dying
Author: Megory Anderson
Publisher: Church Publishing, Inc.
Total Pages: 80
Release: 2005-08-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0819225908

A useful guide to being present and offering comfort to the dying and their families. Megory Anderson was called to a vigil at the bedside of a friend who was dying one night. That experience was so powerful that she began working with others who needed help attending to those who were dying. Today Anderson is the executive director of the Sacred Dying Foundation in San Francisco, and trains others in the art of "vigiling," a way of attending to the needs of the dying. This practical and concise handbook provides a brief overview of what to expect and how to respond to the needs of someone who is dying. Attending the Dying can be used by and for people of any faith perspective, as well as no particular faith. Chaplains, social workers, hospital-care workers, and friends or family of the dying will all find this a helpful companion for preparing themselves to be present to one of life's most sacred transitions.

The Hour of Our Death

The Hour of Our Death
Author: Philippe Aries
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 697
Release: 2013-11-06
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0804152004

An “absolutely magnificent” book (The New Republic)—the fruit of almost two decades of study—that traces the changes in Western attitudes toward death and dying from the earliest Christian times to the present day. A truly landmark study, The Hour of Our Death reveals a pattern of gradually developing evolutionary stages in our perceptions of life in relation to death, each stage representing a virtual redefinition of human nature. Starting at the very foundations of Western culture, the eminent historian Phillipe Ariès shows how, from Graeco-Roman times through the first ten centuries of the Common Era, death was too common to be frightening; each life was quietly subordinated to the community, which paid its respects and then moved on. Ariès identifies the first major shift in attitude with the turn of the eleventh century when a sense of individuality began to rise and with it, profound consequences: death no longer meant merely the weakening of community, but rather the destruction of self. Hence the growing fear of the afterlife, new conceptions of the Last Judgment, and the first attempts (by Masses and other rituals) to guarantee a better life in the next world. In the 1500s attention shifted from the demise of the self to that of the loved one (as family supplants community), and by the nineteenth century death comes to be viewed as simply a staging post toward reunion in the hereafter. Finally, Ariès shows why death has become such an unendurable truth in our own century—how it has been nearly banished from our daily lives—and points out what may be done to “re-tame” this secret terror. The richness of Ariès's source material and investigative work is breathtaking. While exploring everything from churches, religious rituals, and graveyards (with their often macabre headstones and monuments), to wills and testaments, love letters, literature, paintings, diaries, town plans, crime and sanitation reports, and grave robbing complaints, Aries ranges across Europe to Russia on the one hand and to England and America on the other. As he sorts out the tangled mysteries of our accumulated terrors and beliefs, we come to understand the history—indeed the pathology—of our intellectual and psychological tensions in the face of death.

Death, American Style

Death, American Style
Author: Lawrence R. Samuel
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Total Pages: 214
Release: 2013-07-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1442222247

DEATH, AMERICAN STYLE: A CULTURAL HISTORY OF DYING IN AMERICA is the first comprehensive cultural history to explore America’s uneasy relationship with death over the past century.

Dying and Death in Canada, Third Edition

Dying and Death in Canada, Third Edition
Author: Herbert C. Northcott
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2016-07-07
Genre: Family & Relationships
ISBN: 1442634561

"Dying and Death in Canada offers a comprehensive discussion of dying, death, and bereavement from a Canadian perspective. The third edition has been thoroughly updated and several new topics have been added, including assisted suicide and active euthanasia, end of life care, emerging trends in funerary practices, and changing conceptualizations and interventions in the grieving process. A glossary has also been added along with end-of-chapter review questions and an appendix listing recent and seminal movies, television programs, documentary films, and other visual media sources dealing with dying and death. The new edition includes 22 black and white photos, 4 figures, and 3 tables."--

The Modern Art of Dying

The Modern Art of Dying
Author: Shai J. Lavi
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 239
Release: 2009-01-10
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1400826772

How we die reveals much about how we live. In this provocative book, Shai Lavi traces the history of euthanasia in the United States to show how changing attitudes toward death reflect new and troubling ways of experiencing pain, hope, and freedom. Lavi begins with the historical meaning of euthanasia as signifying an "easeful death." Over time, he shows, the term came to mean a death blessed by the grace of God, and later, medical hastening of death. Lavi illustrates these changes with compelling accounts of changes at the deathbed. He takes us from early nineteenth-century deathbeds governed by religion through the medicalization of death with the physician presiding over the deathbed, to the legalization of physician-assisted suicide. Unlike previous books, which have focused on law and technique as explanations for the rise of euthanasia, this book asks why law and technique have come to play such a central role in the way we die. What is at stake in the modern way of dying is not human progress, but rather a fundamental change in the way we experience life in the face of death, Lavi argues. In attempting to gain control over death, he maintains, we may unintentionally have ceded control to policy makers and bio-scientific enterprises.

Western Attitudes toward Death

Western Attitudes toward Death
Author: Philippe Ariès
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 134
Release: 1975-08-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780801817625

AriA]s traces Western man's attitudes toward mortality from the early medieval conception of death as the familiar collective destiny of the human race to the modern tendency, so pronounced in industrial societies, to hide death as if it were an embarrassing family secret. -- Newsweek

The Lost Art of Dying

The Lost Art of Dying
Author: L.S. Dugdale
Publisher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2020-07-07
Genre: Self-Help
ISBN: 0062932659

A Columbia University physician comes across a popular medieval text on dying well written after the horror of the Black Plague and discovers ancient wisdom for rethinking death and gaining insight today on how we can learn the lost art of dying well in this wise, clear-eyed book that is as compelling and soulful as Being Mortal, When Breath Becomes Air, and Smoke Gets in Your Eyes. As a specialist in both medical ethics and the treatment of older patients, Dr. L. S. Dugdale knows a great deal about the end of life. Far too many of us die poorly, she argues. Our culture has overly medicalized death: dying is often institutional and sterile, prolonged by unnecessary resuscitations and other intrusive interventions. We are not going gently into that good night—our reliance on modern medicine can actually prolong suffering and strip us of our dignity. Yet our lives do not have to end this way. Centuries ago, in the wake of the Black Plague, a text was published offering advice to help the living prepare for a good death. Written during the late Middle Ages, ars moriendi—The Art of Dying—made clear that to die well, one first had to live well and described what practices best help us prepare. When Dugdale discovered this Medieval book, it was a revelation. Inspired by its holistic approach to the final stage we must all one day face, she draws from this forgotten work, combining its wisdom with the knowledge she has gleaned from her long medical career. The Lost Art of Dying is a twenty-first century ars moriendi, filled with much-needed insight and thoughtful guidance that will change our perceptions. By recovering our sense of finitude, confronting our fears, accepting how our bodies age, developing meaningful rituals, and involving our communities in end-of-life care, we can discover what it means to both live and die well. And like the original ars moriendi, The Lost Art of Dying includes nine black-and-white drawings from artist Michael W. Dugger. Dr. Dugdale offers a hopeful perspective on death and dying as she shows us how to adapt the wisdom from the past to our lives today. The Lost Art of Dying is a vital, affecting book that reconsiders death, death culture, and how we can transform how we live each day, including our last.