Reviewed by: History of Suicide: Voluntary Death in Western Culture G. S. Rousseau Georges Minois. History of Suicide: Voluntary Death in Western Culture. Translated by Lydia G. Cochrane. Medicine and Culture. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. 387 pp. $35.95. Every historically minded reader needs to know three fundamental aspects of the history of suicide: first, its broad historical curve and the moments of its major transformations; second, its essential philosophical or (as we are now prone to say) ethical dimensions, and the reasons for the main arguments pro or con; and third, its relation to the components of society—religious, social, economic, psychological, legal, medical—that impinge upon, and sometimes even determine, its fate in a particular culture. This is a tall order, and no one either intelligent or scrupulous, as George Minois appears to be (an experienced writer of more than fourteen books, according to this book’s jacket), would set out to write suicide’s “history” from the Greeks to the present time in a single volume. More correctly, “the history of the idea of suicide”—for this is intellectual history, or what used to be called the history of ideas. Minois sensibly begins in the ancient world but, curiously, ends in the Enlightenment—when, some historians will say, this most dreaded of human decisions assumed the protean shapes found in the modern arc from Madame de Staël, a staunch proponent, to the recent trial of Michigan’s Dr. Jack Kevorkian, who assists the terminally ill to commit “self murder” (the term used until the 1730s, rather than Minois’s “involuntary death”) without “timor mortis.” Suicide, the word and concept, was still premodern, according to Minois, in the middle of the eighteenth century when Scottish philosopher David Hume was offering reasons [End Page 161] for its vindication. The difference depends on the open forum of debate (Minois’s process “from free debate to silence,” p. 302), as well as the practical endorsement to encourage voluntary death. Prevention—a category that has loomed large in contemporary debates—is a very recent component. Before our century, national programs to curb “self murder” in Europe and America were deemed to be of much lower national priority than (for example) coping with the scourges of famine, epidemic, and war. It was thought that “self murder,” like bad luck or unrequited love, was engraved in our stars. Since World War II our enlightened geriatric milieu has tried to prevent the suicide of the elderly, not to mention the young (for whom suicide remains the leading cause of death after accidents). Concerns like these make it evident that suicide cannot be discussed apart from its cultural context. It is therefore to Minois’s credit that he presents his material chronologically, in an attempt to chart the local terrain, so to speak, before adjudging whether it makes sense in any individual case. That is, whether the “self murderer” was to be condemned or condoned. In Shakespeare, where more than two hundred and fifty characters kill themselves, the young are more prone to suicide (Ophelia versus Claudius, Cordelia versus Lear). The literary evidence is significant; using it together with philosophical material, Minois has constructed his eras of suicide and their strands of argument, and has identified the major thinkers—from Donne and Pascal, to Hume, Voltaire and Rousseau—very much as historians of ideas would. Historically minded readers will want, however, to know more—especially the reasons why the forms of public discussion and inquiry into suicide were so crucial. What indeed was the public and private discourse of suicide then, in which arenas, and under what (almost Foucauldian) controls? What was the fate of the suicide’s body in different societies? How was it disposed of? What were suicide’s regional and national characteristics? Is it credible to exclude the East and the Orient, even as backdrops? How was the criminal status versus the medical profile of the suicide considered in different national legal systems (the latter in view of our current American debate about the courage of those who open their veins when it is clear that vegetative decay and decrepitude are all they have to look forward to)? Think about...
Search from 250 M+ research papersSearch from 250 M+ research papers
Open Access
Mar 1, 2004
Bryan W Leach 
