Vigor Mortis

Kate Berridge

Profile, 2002, £7.99

ISBN 1 86197 411 6

Rating: ****

Just as causes of death have changed dramatically over the past centuries, so have the ways in which we deal with the dead. Berridges book is well written and very entertaining, in spite of the subject matter.

Berridge shows that our attitude to mortal remains is as much at the whim of fashion and the vagaries of historical accident, as any other part of our lives. She describes, for example, the connection between the killing fields of the first world war and the end of the Victorian practice of prolonged public mourning, clad in black.

We follow the slow rise of cremation through city population booms, body snatching, public health concerns, and the considerable influence of the funeral choices of a fashionable few, to its position today as the preferred method of body disposal.

Much of the book concerns contemporary behaviour, including the return of mass public displays of grief, peaking with the death of Diana (but triggered following the football stadium disasters of the 1980s and 1990s). A very interesting comparison is made between the public reaction to Dianas death and that of another “peoples princess,” Princess Charlotte, who died in 1817 while trying to deliver a future king.

There is a lively, up-beat, if not to say anti-establishment discussion of current funeral practices and options. Berridge has obviously retained her journalistic skill at getting in among those she wants to write about. She has attended conferences and exhibitions and even got herself on a panel choosing the best kept graveyard in Britain. She strongly supports (but does not evangelise) the return of funeral arrangements to the hands of the family.

As a preregistration house officer, certifying death soon becomes just another job on your endless to do list. We rapidly forget, perhaps necessarily so, the disruption we have just officially triggered in the lives of those more permanently affected by the death. Funerals are an important part of the grieving process and are for the living, not for the dead. This book would certainly be more informative to the bereaved than the po-faced leaflets on “What to do when someone dies.”