DEATH AND DYINGon the Hiroshima bombing; Eric Lindemann’s
report on the psychiatric effects of the disastrous
Coconut Grove fire in Boston; Avery Weisman’s
clinical studies of dying patients; Lloyd Warner’s
interpretation of the meaning of ceremonial events
that honor the dead; Herman Feifel’s work on
social taboos; Richard Kalish’s early essays on
teaching; Parsons’ emerging theory of the rela-
tionship of social action to death, and so on.
Fulton, clearly aware of these varying expressions
of interest, was prompted to try to interpret the
diversity and ‘‘get it all together.’’ What Fulton did
in Death and Identity (1965) was to piece together
some three dozen edited excerpts from the works
of a wide range of experts who had written on an
equally wide range of death-related topics. He
found American society to be essentially death
denying.
The Minnesota Conference, 1967. At the Min-
nesota Conference of 1967, Alber Sullivan of the
Minnesota Medical School and Jacques Choron of
the New School of Social Research spoke to vari-
ous medical and philosophical issues; Jeanne Quint
from the University of California reported on the
role of the nurse in dealing with terminal patients;
Eric Lindemann of Harvard Medical School dis-
cussed the symptomatology of acute grief; Her-
man Feifel of the Veterans Administration, fa-
mous for his work on taboos, emphasized that
death always carries many meanings; and Talcott
Parsons from Harvard probed the topic in broad
theoretical terms.
It was a heady agenda but there were some
strange omissions. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, then
known to be working on the ‘‘stages’’ of dying (On
Death and Dying, 1969) was scarcely mentioned,
nor was much made of the equally influential work
of Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss (1965), whose
book Awareness of Dying had been published two
years earlier. The participants in the Minnesota
Conference were intrigued by various sociological
questions. They wrestled with Karl Mannheim’s
thought experiment of what society would be like
if there were no death (Mannheim 1928, 1959).
They wondered what mortality and fertility rates
had been historically and how they are related (cf.
Riley and Riley 1986). They debated Robert Blauner’s
thesis (Blauner 1966) that death in all known
societies imposes imperatives (a corpse must be
looked after, property must be reallocated, vacat-
ed roles must be reassigned, the solidarity of the
deceased’s group must be reaffirmed). They at-
tacked hospital regimens that depersonalized ter-
minal patients, and they challenged the medical
profession for treating death as ‘‘the enemy’’ and
prolonging life at any cost.The conference produced extravagant results
in anticipating two critical issues: the norms and
arrangements for dealing with dying persons were
both confused and hazy; and the greater attention
paid to caregivers than to dying persons. But the
fact that the conference was consistent in insisting
that dying always involves at least two persons
turned out to be its most important message for
the future agenda. Sociological interest in death
and dying, of course, did not start with the Minne-
sota Conference, but what the conference did was
to underscore the often overlooked sociological
proposition that the dying process is essentially
social in nature.A REVIEW OF SOCIOLOGICAL INQUIRIESThe answer to the second question about related
research is more straightforward. A bit of Ameri-
can history shows the range of topics that has
received sociological attention. In the 1930s socio-
logical interest in death and dying had focused
mainly on the economic plight of the bereaved
family (Eliot 1932). In the 1950s attention turned
to the high cost of dying and the commercializa-
tion of funerals (Bowman 1959). Twenty years
later, it shifted to a medley of popular topics of
peripheral sociological interest, with many books
written on various aspects of death and dying, such
as On the Side of Life; On Dying and Denying; After the
Flowers Have Gone; Widow; Caretaker of the Dead;
Death in the American Experience; Last Rights; Some-
one You Love is Dying; The Practice of Death; Grief and
Mourning; No More Dying; Life After Life; The Way
We Die; Death as a Fact of Life; The Immortality
Factor; Facing Death; Death and Obscenity; and Liv-
ing Your Dying. One sociologist termed that burst
of literature a ‘‘collective bustle,’’ and character-
ized the ‘‘discovery’’ of death during the 1970s as
‘‘the happy death movement’’ (Lofland 1978).
There can be no argument that the topic had
become more open. Furthermore, the increasing
use of life-sustaining technologies dictated that the
circumstances of dying became more controllable
and negotiable, even as increasing proportions of
all deaths were occurring in the later years.