In the course of this lethal century, death has been rendered increasingly abstract—a choreographed plunge on the television screen, the punch of a red button in a bomber or a computer game, a statistic in a column of print. The constant flicker of electronic sounds and images that surround us constitutes a mental environment as insulating as the buzzing belief systems of animism, Islam, or medieval Christianity.

As a domestic reality, at least in the Western world, dying has been eased out the door—sent off to the hospital or the nursing home, and the corpse dispatched straight to the mortician, who is handsomely paid for performing his magic out of sight. Open-coffin funerals, the norm in my boyhood, have all but vanished in Protestant middle-class circles. Men and women not involved in mortuary, medical, or police work can now lead full, long lives without ever having to see, let alone touch, a corpse. So Twelvetrees Press, in its black-jacketed, beautifully produced volume entitled Sleeping Beauty: Memorial Photography in America, has managed to come up with a book that, in our hard-to-shock age, is truly disturbing and repellent—a book we open with difficulty, though there is little but stillness and tenderness within, and a mood of grieving love.

Sleeping Beauty presents over 70 photographs of the dead or dying from 1842 to 1925, with a few black-clad live mourners included. As the book’s organizer and editor, Dr. Stanley B. Burns, informs us in his preface:

“Post-mortem photography, photographing a deceased person, was a common practice in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These photographs were often the only ones taken of their subjects and much pride and artistry went into them. It is astounding that although postmortem photographs make up the largest group of 19th-century American genre photographs, they are largely unseen, and unknown.”

More than half of the examples in this collection are of children. In some the dead child, stiff as a doll with rigor mortis, is posed in the arms of a parent. Some photographs clearly show the effects of dehydration and malnutrition produced by a host of unchecked and maltreated diseases—cholera, typhoid fever, dysentery, diphtheria, scarlet fever, measles. One especially painful pair shows a child before death, gazing from his pillow, and after, with a gravely straight parting and stiffly held lips. Where the photographer has been exceptionally successful in creating a lifelike appearance, we are disturbed by our own assent to sentimentality’s denial of the undeniable.

The common man and woman of the 19th century had no choice but to face death. Until the work of Pasteur and Lister in the 1860s, the microbes of disease ranged uncomprehended and unchallenged. Child mortality ran from 30 to 50 percent. Epidemics often wiped out all the young of a family. More than one in 30 mothers died in childbirth, and a soldier was ten times