I can’t decide what to do with my corpse. Embalming, the bread-and-butter of the American funeral industry, feels wrong. Is […]
“Considerable Grief”: Dead Bodies, Mortuary Science, and Repatriation after the Great War
In September 1919, Mary McKenney was forced to relive the horrors of her husband Arthur’s death. Sergeant Arthur McKenney was […]
Mange, Morphine, and Deadly Disease: Medicine and Public Health in Red Dead Redemption 2
Spoiler warning: This essay discusses major plot points about the ending of Red Dead Redemption 2. It’s dead midnight, there’s […]
A Historian’s Trip to the Graveyard
bardo, noun (In Tibetan Buddhism) a state of existence between death and rebirth, varying in length according to a person’s […]
Public Health and the Dead at Johnstown
In the twenty-four hour news cycle we live in, we frequently are treated to instantaneous images of disasters unfolding around […]
Hoping for a Good Death
We interrupt our regularly scheduled program to bring you this special report: Elizabeth Reis, professor and chair of the Women’s and […]