Thanatology

the study of death—delves into matters as diverse as the cultural anthropology of the notion of soul, the burial rites and practices of early civilizations, the location of cemeteries in the Middle Ages, and the conceptual difficulties involved in defining death in an individual whose brain is irreversibly dead but whose respiration and heartbeat are kept going by artificial means. It encompasses the biological study of programmed cell death, the understanding care of the dying.