On August 24, 2021, 98-year-old David Saunders died from COVID-19 at a hospital near Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Nearly two months […]
Screaming Over the Rubble: The Shifting Role of the Family in American Disaster Victim Identification
When the South Champlain Towers in Surfside, Florida, collapsed in the early hours of June 24, I shuddered to think […]
“Heroic Effort Beyond the Call of Duty”: Death Care Workers and the 1947 Texas City Disaster
On April 16, 2020, the New York Times published an op-ed about the challenges facing overwhelmed funeral directors around the […]
The Deathbed: A New Nursing Clio Series
This past fall, when we began work on a Nursing Clio series about death, we never imagined the world would […]
Waiting for a Death Revolution: A Review of HBO’s Alternate Endings: Six New Ways to Die in America
I can’t decide what to do with my corpse. Embalming, the bread-and-butter of the American funeral industry, feels wrong. Is […]
Armchair Detectives and the Allure of Death in Miniature at the Smithsonian
It was one of the coldest January days in recent memory, but that didn’t seem to deter the crowds inside […]
“Witness the ‘Wall of Genitals’”: Anatomical Display at Brooklyn’s House of Wax
Located in the lobby of the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in Brooklyn, the House of Wax is a dimly lit bar […]
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 […]
