Encyclopedia of Death and Dying

Eds Glennys Howarth, Oliver Leaman

Routledge, £85, pp 560

ISBN 0 415 18825 3

Rating:

Although there have been textbooks and encyclopaedias on palliative care for decades now, the wider interdisciplinary study of death and dying is a relatively recent phenomenon. Academic study of death and dying within the social sciences—such as the masters' programme on death and society at Reading University—is new. Thanatology, the study of death, is almost unrecognised as a term, and the study of customs and taboos around death and dying has, for the best part of a century, been considered the province of the more obscurantist among anthropologists. So this volume deserves a profound welcome.

Howarth and Leaman have attempted to deal …