Flesh in the Age of Reason (34 page)

In a comparable way the gentleman-philosopher Abraham Tucker showed in his
The Light of Nature Pursued
(1768) how beliefs about death emerged from rather elementary associations of ideas. Frightening indeed was ‘the melancholy appearance of a lifeless body, the mansion provided for it to inhabit, dark, cold, close and solitary, are shocking to the imagination; but it is to the imagination only, not the understanding, for whoever consults this faculty will see at first glance, that there is nothing dismal in all these circumstances.’ Tucker’s thinking was evidently underpinned by Locke, who had argued in his
Essay concerning Human Understanding
that the fear of darkness was not a natural condition, but arose from bedtime stories told by ‘foolish’ maids to innocent children:

The
Ideas
of
Goblines
and
Sprights
have really no more to do with Darkness than Light; yet but a foolish Maid inculcate these often on the Mind of a Child, and raise them there together, possibly he shall never be able to
separate them again so long as he lives, but Darkness shall ever afterwards bring with it those frightful
Ideas
, and they shall be so joined that he can no more bear the one than the other.

It was that irrational fear of darkness which sparked fears of one’s fate
post mortem
.

To learn how to die with composure, it was necessary, reasoned Tucker, to overcome the nightmarish phantasms associated with funerary rituals, and the attendant palaver of hell, damnation and demons. Indeed, non-Christian burials became not uncommon, as in the funeral of John Underwood of Cambridgeshire, reported in the
Gentleman’s Magazine
in 1733, in which the requiem involved the singing of the thirty-first Ode of Horace, after which the mourners were invited to take a glass of wine and then instructed to forget the departed.

‘A desire of preserving the body seems to have prevailed in most countries of the world,’ noted Mary Wollstonecraft, reflecting on some embalmed corpses she came across in Norway, while travelling on a business mission for her American lover, Gilbert Imlay, and the experience provoked a flood of musings typical of the late Enlightenment mind.

When I was shewn these human petrifactions, I shrunk back with disgust and horror. ‘Ashes to ashes!’ thought I – ‘Dust to dust!’ – If this be not dissolution, it is something worse than natural decay. It is treason against humanity, thus to lift up the awful veil which would fain hide its weakness. The grandeur of the active principles is never more strongly felt than at such a sight; for nothing is so ugly as the human form when deprived of life, and thus dried into stone, merely to preserve the most disgusting image of death.

This led her into meditations on the ‘melancholy’ thereby produced, though it was one which ‘exalts the mind’:

Our very soul expands, and we forget our littleness; how painfully brought to our recollection by such vain attempts to snatch from decay what is destined so soon to perish. Life, what art thou? Where goes this breath? this
I
, so much alive? In what element will it mix, giving or receiving fresh energy? – What will break the enchantment of animation? – For worlds, I
would not see a form I loved – embalmed in my heart – thus sacrilegiously handled!

She also mused on the reaction these corpses provoked in her sensibilities in respect of her expectations of the general resurrection of the dead:

I could not learn how long the bodies had been in this state, in which they bid fair to remain till the day of judgment, if there is to be such a day; and before that time, it will require some trouble to make them fit to appear in company with angels, without disgracing humanity.

Wollstonecraft was a pious Anglican, but evidently for her Church dogma could no longer be taken on trust, to the letter: it had to be mediated through the expectations of the sensitive mind; significantly, what she wrote was ‘without disgracing humanity’ rather than ‘without offence to God’: even the afterlife had now become anthropocentric. With her fragile and faltering relationship with Imlay in mind, she finally asked:

without hope, what is to sustain life, but the fear of annihilation – the only thing of which I have ever felt a dread – I cannot bear to think of being no more – of losing myself – though existence is often but a painful consciousness of misery; nay, it appears to me impossible that I should cease to exist, or that this active, restless spirit, equally alive to joy and sorrow, should only be organized dust – ready to fly abroad the moment the spring snaps, or the spark goes out, which kept it together. Surely something resides in this heart that is not perishable – and life is more than a dream.

Among the élite, overtly pagan attitudes towards death and dying grew more conspicuous. Enlightened philosophers set out to teach how to die by providing an alternative, rationalist idea – that the dead were beyond death:
la mort n’est rien
. The Providence-challenging concept of ‘natural death’ became more widely accepted. Approaching dissolution, Hume notoriously bantered with Adam Smith as to how he lacked any good excuse for delaying embarkation upon Charon’s boat across the Styx:

I thought I might say to him, ‘Good Charon, I have been correcting my works for a new edition. Allow me a little time that I may see how the public receives the alterations.’ But Charon would answer, ‘When you have seen the effect of these, you will be for making other alterations. There will be no end of such…’

Among such pagan-minded gentlemen, death ceased thus to be the ultimate enemy, demanding heroic acts of resolution, faith and penitence. Instead, dying came to be widely treated as an easy passing, a final sleep. Laurel wreaths replaced the traditional death’s head on tombs, funeral tablets trumpeted earthly virtues rather than divine justice, and the Gothick paraphernalia of yew trees and screech owls – the props of Thomas Gray’s
Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard
– transformed death from transcendental trauma into an essentially human morality drama which taught that the paths of glory lead but to the grave.

At the same time, death’s scenario grew more secular in another way: it was becoming medicalized. Doctors changed the face of death, not by reducing its ravages or by actually (despite aspirations) increasing longevity, but by playing their part in forging new coping strategies.

Traditional medical etiquette had required that the mortally ill person be informed of his likely fate by his physician. Then, his part in the proceedings complete, the physician would withdraw, leaving the dying person to compose his mind and his will, and to make peace with God and his family. The Stuart practitioner Thomas Willis quit his patients after ‘giving them over’: ‘He groaned horribly like a dying man… then judging the issue to be settled I bade farewell to him and his friends. At evening he died,’ conclude his notes on one of his patients. The doctor’s departure was not due to callous indifference, but rather to a sense of place, proper resignation and dignity. Physic was for the living. Dr Robert James’s
Medicinal Dictionary
(1743), a huge medical compilation, has no entry for death.

The eighteenth century brought the development of the medical management of death at the bedside. ‘When all hopes of revival are
lost,’ declared Dr John Ferriar, ‘it is still the duty of the physician to sooth the last moments of existence.’ The doctor should decide: ‘it belongs to his province, to determine when officiousness becomes torture.’ For Ferriar, the physician’s continued presence in the position of authority was vital, not least to curb the excesses of nurses and servants who were paid to keep watch, with their violent and often cruel folk routines with the dying. Not least, such old women allegedly pronounced people dead prematurely.

According to the new medical protocols, the doctor must manage the actual process of ceasing to be. Early in the nineteenth century, Henry Halford stressed that the physician’s true task must be to ‘smooth the bed of death’, or in other words, to undertake the management of pain, thereby overcoming fear and restoring tranquillity, orchestrating an end which would be serene and blissful. The suave Halford became the most sought-after physician of his age precisely because his patients had confidence that through generous medication he would not let them die in agony. Rumour had it that a ‘lady of the highest rank… declared she would rather die under Sir Henry Halford’s care than recover under any other physician’.

The eighteenth century brought a growing medical interest in death. In 1761 Giovanni Morgagni, Professor of Anatomy at Padua, published
De Sedibus et Causis Morborum
(On the Sites and Causes of Disease) in which he correlated the
post mortem
pathological findings of almost 700 patients with the clinical course of their illnesses. For many lay people, however, such medical scrutiny was rather sinister. Autopsies could represent an assault upon the dead which was both disrespectful and (in the common imagination) also spiritually dangerous, since it condemned them to wander, mutilated and with identity lost, through eternity. In any case, autopsy was tainted because it was the official fate of criminals: after 1752 Parliament allowed judges to order anatomical dissection for the corpses of executed murderers.

From its beginnings in Renaissance Italy, public dissection of felons was staged as an official exhibition, held annually during carnival: ritualization within the upside-down world of that festival sanctioned
the evident sacrilege of violating dead bodies. In England, dissection was publicly authorized in 1564, when the Royal College of Physicians obtained a grant of four corpses yearly. The opening up of the body in the anatomy theatre provided a showcase for medicine, conspicuously laying bare the errors of hidebound Galenism. Cutting up malefactors, however, indelibly tarred a medical procedure with the brush of violence and the violation of taboos, kindling intense and enduring grassroots distrust of dissection.

The ‘Tyburn riots’ staged against the surgeons in Georgian England show the fierce resistance of common people to having their deceased comrades carted off to Surgeons’ Hall and subjected to the profanations of the dissectors – a revulsion caught by Hogarth in the final engraving of his ‘Four Stages of Cruelty’ series, where the murderer Tom Nero is being anatomized by the surgeons: was not medical dissection nothing but brutality writ large and given an official blessing? Public disquiet mounted further against the practice in the light of the sordid and illegal involvement of anatomists with grave-robbers or ‘resurrection men’ (a fascinating colloquialism!)

Quality cadavers were much less likely to meet such a fate – they seldom dug up the rich, ‘resurrectionists’ explained to a parliamentary committee, ‘because they were buried so deep’. Yet this did not stop scare stories about the illegal procurement of bodies and grave-robbing. Such allegations provoked Thomas Hood’s ironic ‘Mary’s Ghost: A Pathetic Ballad’. Her grave rifled and her remains dealt out among the anatomists, poor Mary’s ghost addresses her fiancé:

I vow’d that you should have my hand,
   But fate gives us denial;
You’ll find it there, at Dr Bell’s
    In spirits and a phial.

I can’t tell where my head is gone,
  But Doctor Carpue can:
As for my trunk, it’s all pack’d up
  To go by Pickford’s van.

The cock it crows – I must begone!
   My William we must part!
But I’ll be yours in death, altho’
   Sir Astley has my heart.

With the dead, medicine seemed to be pre-empting the hand of God.

Changing attitudes towards suicide offer a final instance of a withdrawal from traditional Christian teachings. Throughout Christian history ‘self-murder’ had been both sin and crime, an offence against God and King, the business of courts ecclesiastical and civil. Since Tudor times juries had routinely returned verdicts of
felo de se
(wilful self-murder), imposing severe posthumous punishments: the suicide was denied Christian burial, the corpse being interred at a crossroads, a stake through the heart; and the felon’s property was forfeit to the Crown. This cruel treatment expressed Protestant theological rigorism – suicide as a wilful mutiny against God – while also marking the tenacious assertion of royal rights under the new monarchy. Puritanism redoubled the punitiveness.

As in so many other walks of life, the new temper of the Restoration brought a transformation. It soon become standard for coroners’ courts to reach a
non compos mentis
verdict, regardless of any real history or independent sign of mental instability in the victim: was not suicide itself sufficient proof of derangement? This ‘medicalization’ or ‘psychologization’ of self-destruction sanctioned a churchyard burial and put a stop to the escheat of the victim’s possessions – a notable assertion of community will against the Crown at the very moment when Locke was affirming the natural right to property.

Shifting philosophies of the self, in any case, led the élite to commend ‘Antique Roman’ attitudes that approved suicide as noble-minded. On 4 May 1737, having loaded his pockets with rocks, Eustace Budgell, a former contributor to the
Spectator
, drowned himself in the Thames. Found on his desk was a suicide note: ‘What Cato did, and Addison approved, cannot be wrong.’ David Hume and others offered enlightened defences of suicide, and fashionable society meanwhile condoned the deed, holding that death was preferable to
dishonour and, ever eager to outflank bigotry, enlightened opinion abandoned punitiveness for pity. The poet Thomas Chatterton, who poisoned himself at the age of 17, provided the perfect role model for the Romantic suicide cult. And even Pope had asked: