Why do people puke when they see someone dead?
I imagine people puke when someone dies due to the trauma and/or type of death. I’ve seen a motorcycle accident and part of a dead person, and I had the recoiling feeling of being sick. It was merely the grotesque image of the entire incident. I was also with my grandfather when he died. I wasn’t sick or ill, and it was actually very calm and peaceful. The entire experience itself, however, was very strange. I have known people who are sick even when it’s a loved one and not an ugly death. In that case it’s merely loss, trauma, or someone who has a weak stomach. But like I said, unless the death is unusally gross (or it’s a decayed corpse), most people won’t be sick.
Some people have been trained to over respond to all kinds of relatively normal things. Very few people who see bodies have much reaction. Reactions are seen much more frequently in movies. Movies are written by fiction writers. The writers are using the death as a way to create emotional tension. The puking or other over reaction are the release cycle in the fiction structure. It is good to remember that this is fiction. I have seen many dead people. I worked in emergency services for many years. The most emotionally difficult situations for me were motorcycle crashes where beautiful young people become distorted and ugly in a flash. Compared to that dead people are nothing. Waiting for the coroner can be trying as bodies are often in postures they could not stand for 20 seconds if they were alive. They lay there with the bugs going in and out in those uncomfortable postures and it becomes difficult to leave the body be ’till the coroner arrives.
