Lugares dos Mortos na Cidade dos Vivos (The Place of the Dead in the City of the Living) by Claudia Rodrigues is about Changes in funeral customs were part of broader changes that swept through the city of Rio de Janeiro in the nineteenth century. The author, Claudia Rodrigues, documents extensively attitudes and practices of the population with regards to death and the dead.

The ideal death would not be lonely, it had its own sophisticated ritual. However, epidemics of yellow fever and cholera had a profound impact on death, which came to be something solitary, because the physical health of the living was prioritized, to the detriment of the spiritual health of the dead. Thus, the living expelled the dead from their midst.