ABSTRACT
In 1850 people died at home, often without a doctor in attendance. The body was washed, dressed, and laid out by family members. Local carpenters were called in to make a simple coffin. The middle-class home in which death occurred had special importance, as well as a special fragility. America was urbanizing and changing more rapidly than at any other time in its history: “…the proportion of people living in cities (between 1820 and 1860) rose by 797 per cent.”6 As cities grew, relationships among people changed. The changing scale of the city forced all residents to confront new, even alien work and interpersonal relationships,
to confront the sights and sounds of an accelerated urban economy…. This shift from country to city, from farm to factory, was perhaps the most fundamentally dislocating experience in all of American history.7
