Death's Summer Coat

October 5, 2015
Schillace, managing editor of the journal Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, goes beyond the typical treatise on mortality with this wide-ranging and captivating history of what it means to be alive. Beginning as early as her research permits (around 1800 B.C.E., with the first known medical text on pregnancy), she goes up to the present, showing how the rituals and procedures surrounding death derive from the theories humans use to come to terms with it. As Schillace herself notes, the book favors Western sources, with occasional dips into other cultures. Nonetheless, her explorations are extensive and interdisciplinary, drawing on research in the sciences but also valuing the many expressions of death in the arts. Accordingly, each chapter is illustrated with images, such as religious artwork and—most hauntingly—Victorian-era memento mori photography. Schillace, simply through her personable voice and personal stories, is able to breathe compassion into what might otherwise be a depressing topic. Though the main theme of grief and loss in death is familiar, readers will come away with ample new—and endlessly fascinating—information. This vibrant window to other lives also creates a deeper understanding of one’s own.

January 1, 2016

Schillace (managing editor of Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry) raises the issue of the avoidance of mortality in Western culture. Through a historical-anthropological framework, she considers grief rituals in non-Western cultures and presents a selective history of Western approaches to death. Throughout this work, the focus is on death as event and process and on the act of grieving as a rite of passage. Moreover, the author's approach to Western history is haphazard, jumping from the Black Death to the Protestant Reformation to the Victorians. After the 19th century, religious rituals for death and dying are hardly mentioned. Instead, the book's concentration shifts to the role of doctors as priests in the "sanitized" dying process of today. Schillace concludes by exploring options for "rehumanizing" death through the creation of new customs. She considers briefly the emerging role of hospices and natural funerary practices; however, this section is sparse, with few suggestions. VERDICT Schillace raises a lot of questions surrounding the issue of mortality, leaving readers to form their own answers. Those interested in the topic should consider other works, such as Ann Neumann's The Good Death, for more representations on related Western perspectives.--Daniel Wigner, South Plains Coll., Lubbock, TX

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 1, 2015
A wide-ranging, user-friendly attempt to make death an acceptable, even comfortable, topic of ordinary conversation. Cultural historian Schillace (Medical History/Case Western Reserve Univ.), managing editor of the health journal Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, believes that by learning about the practices associated with death and dying in other cultures and in earlier times, we can approach our mortality with less fear. In contrast to the medicalization of death in today's Western world, the author presents various rituals and cultural customs, including Tibetan Buddhist sky burials and Victorian memento mori photography, as ways of keeping the bereaved connected to the deceased. She skims lightly through centuries of history, touching on the replacement of priests by physicians at the deathbed, the impact of medieval plagues, and the role of body snatchers in medical education. Schillace partly compensates for the shallowness of the history with numerous unusual and fascinating black-and-white illustrations that feature corpses, skeletons, medical students, gravestones, and grieving mothers. Later in the narrative, the author turns to how death is managed in the contemporary West, how rituals have been devalued, how the dying have been hidden away from sight in hospitals, and how the disposal of the dead is managed by funeral directors. "Perhaps compassion works best in collaboration].Death need not be a solo affair," writes the author. "It can be communal, and is perhaps best approached in just that way." She writes glowingly of a growing movement to counter the death-denying attitude of Western society: the emergence of Death Salons and Death Cafes, in which ordinary people, not necessarily the bereaved, come together to talk openly and freely about death, to ask questions, and to share ideas]to have a conversation about death. Surprisingly easy reading on a usually dark topic and fine preparation for anyone preparing to launch or simply attend a Death Salon or Cafe.

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