Death and the doctors. Essay review.

JOHN McMANNERS, Death and the Enlightenment. Changing attitudes to death among Christians and unbelievers in eighteenth-century France,'Oxford University Press, 1981, 8vo, pp. vii, 619, £17.50. JOACHIM WHALEY (editor), Mirrors ofmortality. Studies in the social history of death, London, Europa, 1981, pp. vii, 252, £19.50. There is no more universal social fact than death ("never send to know for whom the bell tolls"). Yet death is the topic supremely difficult for historians to research, since, though all live under its shadow, none has experienced it directly for himself, and there are no scientific tests of its most momentous putative consequence, an afterlife, for which men have slain and been slain. It is, nevertheless, a fashionable subject of inquiry, gaining 6clat first in France, and now, like so many other Paris fashions, being exported to Britain and across the Atlantic. One can chronicle death at the most metaphysical level (as in Norman 0. Brown's Life against Death (1959), a Freudian psychohistory of mankind, viewing civilization as a holding operation, keeping death at bay, a bid on immortality), or in the most personal terms, as in Victor and Rosemary Zorza's Kindertotenbuch, A way ofdying (1980), which offers a moving account of the agonies of coming to terms with the departure of a loved one. But when the historian tries to stare death in the face and penetrate to its essence, pure and simple, the subject vanishes before his eyes. For death always comes wreathed in culture. From earliest times, as Chapman, Kinnes, and Randsborg reiterate in their wide-ranging survey, extinction has never been left as a mere biological fact, but saturated with meanings, symbols, myths, and artefacts, from the weapons, the supplies, the adornments left around the Neolithic corpse, up to the nunc dimittis and the last words, the wakes and ale. So the historian has to stalk death by stealth, from an oblique angle. The death sentence is a fact that can be taken for granted, though its comparative timing will interest demographers and social and medical historians. But death's language is a rich rhetoric, whose tropes eschatology and soteriology, the viaticum and absolution, the formularies of wills, sarcophagi, hearses and steles, black crepe and the paraphernalia of grieving give expression to the stories, the guilt, and fantasies of the living. How far decyphering the language of death will enable us to recover the experience of the dying person, or just the piteous or grotesque ceremonials of all that surround him; how far the history of death should, in fact, be about the dying person or rather about the survivors are issues dividing the approaches of the contributors to the books now under review. The doyen of the historians of death, Philippe Aries, is one who is confident enough