ABSTRACT
By the eighteenth century, gradual developments in religious and medical protocols had transformed Western traditions surrounding death, dying, and grieving. For centuries, Christian tradition preordained the primary role of family members, with their responsibility for nursing their dying relative and gathering around the deathbed to seek reconciliation. After the person’s death, a church funeral, a parish burial, and a period of public mourning aided in tempering the inevitable pangs of loss and grief. Hospitals and commercial undertakers, by contrast, are much more recent innovations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.3
