Modern medicine has made death remote from our everyday experience, yet perhaps for this very reason we remain acutely conscious of our own mortality, and the physical aspects of death still arouse feelings of enormous unease. This is an examination of the secular side of death, consisting of bizarre and irreverent anecdotes and illustrated with grisly images. The author, a psychiatrist, writes with humour and an eye for the off-beat. He concentrates on the macabre, and records the lengths to which men and women throughout history have gone to cope with such fears as premature burial, posthumous indignity and bodily disintegration - not to mention simple obscurity. The book's topics include embalming, mummification, necrophilia and grave-robbing, and range from eccentric tombs to methods of embalming; from freakish deaths to the Necropolis Railway which once ran from Waterloo Station; from Emma, Countess of Mount Edgcumbe, who while lying in state in the family chapel awoke to find a sexton stealing her rings, to Count Karnice-Karnicki's contraption which would sound sirens and flash lights if a corpse were to stir in its coffin.