History of Suicide: Voluntary Death in Western Culture (Medicine and Culture) - Hardcover

Minois, Mr. Georges

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0801859190 ISBN 13: 9780801859199

Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998

Synopsis

In this compact and illuminating history, Georges Minois examines how a culture's attitudes about suicide reflect its larger beliefs and values--attitudes toward life and death, duty and honor, pain and pleasure. Minois begins his survey with classical Greece and Rome, where suicide was acceptable--even heroic--under some circumstances. With the rise of Christianity, however, suicide was unequivocally condemned as self-murder and an insult to God. With the Renaissance and its renewed interest in classical culture, suicide reemerged as a philosophical issue. Minois finds examples of changing attitudes in key Renaissance texts by Bacon, Montaigne, Sidney, Donne, and Shakespeare.

By 1700, the term suicide had replaced self-murder and the subject began to interest the emerging scientific disciplines. Minois follows the ongoing evaluation of suicide through the Enlightenment and the Romantic periods, and he examines attitudes that emerge in nineteenth- and twentieth-century science, law, philosophy, and literature. Minois concludes with comments on the most recent turn in this long and complex history -- the emotional debate over euthanasia, assisted suicide, and the right to die.

About this title

Review:

"A comprehensive and intriguing study of the grim commingling of resolve and mystery that has characterized the act of and reaction to suicide since the Roman Empire gave way to the Middle Ages in Europe... Balanced, engaging and sufficiently detailed with dark truths to keep the extramural reader interested." -- Thomas Lynch, author of The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade, in The Washington Times

Synopsis:

According to the author, the complexity of the philosophical problem of suicide is reflected in Western culture's contradictory and ambivalent attitudes on the subject: Cato, Cleopatra and Samson were heroic in taking their own lives; Judas, Brutus and Achitophel were cowards. In this history, he examines how a culture's attitudes about suicide reflect its larger beliefs and values - attitudes toward life and death, duty and honor, pain and pleasure. Minois begins his survey with classical Greece and Rome, where suicide was acceptable, even heroic, under some circumstances. With the rise of Christianity however, suicide was unequivocally condemned as "self-murder" and an insult to God, who alone had the right to give and take life. With the Renaissance and its renewed interest in classical culture, suicide re-emerged as a philosophical issue. Minois finds examples of changing attitudes in Renaissance texts by Bacon, Montaigne, Donne and Shakespeare, whose question "To be, or not to be?" signalled the return of a more ambivalent view of suicide and a more open discussion of its meaning.

Minois follows the ongoing re-evaluation of suicide through the Enlightenment and the Romantic periods, and examines attitudes which emerge in 19th- and 20th-century science, law, philosophy and literature - developments that would enable a writer such as Camus to place the issue of suicide at the heart of modern philosophy. Minois comments on the most recent turn in this long and complex history - the emotive debate over euthanasia and the right to die.

About this edition

• Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0801859190
• ISBN 13: 9780801859199
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 400