Let Death be Death: Lessons from the Irish Wake

Grainger, Roger

doi:10.1080/713685896

Cited by 6 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…Thus in Eire, the body is typically removed to the church the night before the funeral, where it is waked by relatives who stay to look after the body and pray for the soul. This may in part be an attempt by the church to prevent some of the wilder excesses of waking in the home that characterize Irish folklore (Grainger 1998;O'Crualoich 1998). The open coffin funerals of the Orthodox tradition also dramatically display the body within an ecclesiastical rather than commercial setting.…”

Section: The Religious Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Three ways to arrange a funeral: Mortuary variation in the modern West

Walter¹

2005

Mortality

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Why do funeral practices vary between modern western countries? In the mid-nineteenth century, managing the rapidly expanding number of corpses had to be controlled and rationalized, but this control could be exercised by business, the municipality, or the church, leading to three pure types of funeral organization -commercial, municipal, religious -and a number of mixed types. These institutional types interacted with wider cultural factors to create in each country an identifiable national solution to the problem of disposing of the dead in a mobile, urban, modern society. By the late twentieth century, a global demand for more freedom and individuality spawned reform movements, targeting a different bastion of institutional power in each country.

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Section: The Religious Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Three ways to arrange a funeral: Mortuary variation in the modern West

Walter¹

2005

Mortality

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“…While the presence of micro‐organisms in the rectal region could be due to the gut microbiota, different reasons could explain the high abundance of microbial colonies in the oral cavity in comparison with other regions. In Irish culture, the human body after death is viewed as part of ‘The Wake’ (Grainger ) after being washed and prepared for the event (Trompette and Lemonnier ). Disinfectants are used to wash specific body surfaces that do could be a potential health hazard when touched by family and friends excluding the oral cavity.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The antimicrobial capacity of embalming solutions: a comparative study

2019

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Aims Infectious health risks are associated with handling human cadavers and to decrease such risks, cadavers are embalmed using different chemicals. The aim of this study is to quantify the amount of micro‐organisms present in different regions of human cadavers before embalming, after embalming and over a period of 8 months. Methods and Results Human cadavers were embalmed using Thiel, formalin, Genelyn and the Imperial College London soft‐preservation (ICL‐SP) solution with two cadavers per technique. Sterile swabs were used to collect samples from different regions. Samples were collected every 2 months. All cadavers had a high number of microbial colonies before embalming. While no colonies were detected on formalin and Genelyn embalmed cadavers post‐embalming, the number of colonies decreased significantly in Thiel‐embalmed cadavers and stayed relatively the same in ICL‐SP–embalmed cadavers. Conclusions Formalin‐embalmed cadavers showed the strongest disinfecting abilities followed by Thiel‐embalmed cadavers, then Genelyn‐embalmed cadavers and finally by ICL‐SP cadavers. Significance and Impact of the Study This study highlights how under researched this area is and the evident variation in the antimicrobial abilities of different embalming solutions on the cadaver as a whole and within different regions of the same cadaver.

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“…Even less has been written about funeral teas in Britain than about funerals themselves-but for perspectives from other cultures, see Cann (2017), Grainger (1998), Yoder (1986). It is not clear how often instructions are given to mourners about attending the tea, but where correspondents mention a message being relayed to them, it is always an invitation rather than a restriction.…”

Section: Displaying Familymentioning

confidence: 99%

How Funerals Accomplish Family: Findings From a Mass-Observation Study

Walter

Bailey

2018

Omega (Westport)

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The article analyses how potentially conflicting frames of grief and family operate in a number of English funerals. The data come from the 2010 Mass-Observation directive “Going to Funerals” which asked its panel of correspondents to write about the most recent funeral they had attended. In their writings, grief is displayed through conventional understandings of family. Drawing on Randall Collins, we show how the funeral stratifies mourners into family or nonfamily, a stratification accomplished—by family and nonfamily—through both outward display and inner feeling. The funerals described were more about a very traditional notion of family than about grief; family trumped grief, or at least provided the frame through which grief could be written about; and perceptions of “family” prompted emotions which in turn defined family. The funerals were portrayed as a distinct arena privileging family over the fluid and varied personal attachments highlighted in both the new sociology of personal life and in the concept of disenfranchised grief.

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Let Death be Death: Lessons from the Irish Wake

Cited by 6 publications

References 5 publications

Three ways to arrange a funeral: Mortuary variation in the modern West

Three ways to arrange a funeral: Mortuary variation in the modern West

The antimicrobial capacity of embalming solutions: a comparative study

How Funerals Accomplish Family: Findings From a Mass-Observation Study

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