Penn State professor discusses perceptions of death

An environmental and urban historian displayed the irony of a magazine cover at a talk Thursday. The cover depicted a funeral home with children full of life.

It was just one example of how society’s views of death are constantly changing, said Ellen Stroud, a history professor at Pennsylvania State University. During her talk at Smathers Library, she discussed how society views funeral homes, corpses and cemeteries.

She told about 60 attendees that funeral homes in residential areas can make people sick due to the constant reminder of death. But in the late 1870s, she said, a New Jersey court ruled funeral homes were not a nuisance.

This shows how society has had differing opinions on and reactions to death throughout history, she said.

Railroad workers in the 1800s did not want to transport bodies due to the inhumanity of handling them as if they were pieces of baggage, she said.

“Living things that become inanimate objects are a slippery subject,” Stroud said.

Sophia Acord, the associate director of the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere, said they hosted the event to get people to discuss death, because it is something society often pushes out of mind.

“Every single one of us has death in common,” Acord said. “Since we put it out of our minds, we don’t understand how it affects us and makes us unable to support one another during the grieving process.”

Four other talks will be hosted discussing death, the next one being Feb. 1 at the Millhopper branch library.