Flesh in the Age of Reason (33 page)

The business of dying in early modern England predominantly involved a religious rite, the liberation of the soul from its carnal prison, and its escape, it was hoped, into the heavenly hosts. The seventeenth-century deathbed of the Puritan Philip Henry offers an exemplar of this well-staged drama. Sensing death coming over him, Henry took elaborate farewells of his family, bestowing upon them religious blessings and warnings, and repeatedly uttering pious ejaculations, mixed with prayers and Scripture texts. ‘His Understanding and Speech continued almost to the last Breath,’ concluded his
biographer. ‘One of the last words he said, when he found himself just ready to depart, was
O Death, where is thy
——with that his speech falter’d and he quickly expired.’ His death was exemplary and was written up as such.

Sudden deaths, which threatened this choreographed good death, were dreaded. But they were common. Letters and diaries tell sad stories of tragic drownings, falls, fires, firearms explosions, mishaps with tools, knives, poisons, and ubiquitous traffic spills. From its opening issue in 1731, the
Gentleman’s Magazine
carried a column headed ‘Casualties’, meaning strokes of fate. Readers of the February number encountered someone drowned in Islington ponds, one man dropping dead of an apoplectic fit, two murdered in their beds, a pair suffocated while digging a pit, a coal-dealer falling out of a lighter, an attorney tumbling into a fire, a man drowned in the Thames, another in Queenhythe dock, a city butler, just fired, who slit his throat, a servant’s arm broken after a granary collapsed, a house-fire by the River Medway, another in a Stratford corn-mill, a silk-weaver who cut his throat, a drunken clock-maker likewise, a labourer slaying his children, a man gored by an ox in Cheapside, and, completing the carnage, an Oxford student who lurched off Bottley Bridge and met a watery end. In the March number we find an Eton scholar stabbing his chum to death with a penknife (on the playing fields?), and the burning of the Duke of Beaufort’s seat, with much loss of life. None of these people had a good death.

Appalled by the waste of life, enlightened thinkers abandoned fatalism for self-help, taking in the process steps which some saw as a blasphemous challenge to the inscrutable ways of God. Smallpox inoculation was introduced – though it met resistance from the Calvinist Scottish kirk, since it seemed to gainsay Providence. First-aid techniques were pioneered. First-aid manuals go back as far as Stephen Bradwell’s
Helps for Suddain Accidents
(1633), but it was enlightened practicality and consumerism which got first-aid organized, not least through the sale of ready-made medicine chests and of instruction manuals for the public. In his best-selling
Domestic Medicine
(1769), William Buchan condemned the ‘horrid custom
immediately to consign over to death every person who has the misfortune by a fall, or the like, to be deprived of the appearance of life’. Many lives, he believed, could be saved and all, if properly trained, could save lives: ‘every man is in some measure a surgeon whether he will or not.’ Through such developments, death was beginning to be taken out of the hands of God.

Another resource lay in the hospital movement. Between 1720 and 1745 five great new London hospitals were founded through bequests and private philanthropy: the Westminster, Guy’s, St George’s, the London and the Middlesex; provincial and Scottish infirmaries followed. Every hospital made provision for emergency and casualty admissions. Exclusively targeted at accidents was the Institution for Affording Immediate Relief to Persons Apparently Dead from Drowning, founded in 1774 – in 1776 it changed its name to the Humane Society and from 1785 it became Royal. The Society’s aim was to teach rescue techniques, especially in case of accidents with water. It also supplied equipment, awarded prizes and published pamphlets which advocated mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, tobacco clysters, electric stimulation and the importance of keeping warm. In winning publicity for itself, the Humane Society found an eager organ in the
Gentleman’s Magazine
. Inspired by the Society, newspapers began to carry advice for dealing with accident victims. ‘A correspondent has communicated the following directions for the recovery of persons seemingly drowned,’
Jopson’s Coventry Mercury
told its readers on 31 May 1784:

In the first place, strip them of all their wet cloaths; rub them and lay them in hot blankets before the fire: blow with your breath strongly, or with a pair of bellows into the mouth of the person, holding the nostrils at the same time: afterwards introduce the small end of a lighted tobacco-pipe into the fundament, putting a paper pricked full of holes near the bowl of it, through which you must blow into the bowels.

Exactly paralleling the new concern with ascertaining the true signs of death and snatching back the ‘apparently dead’ was growing anxiety about premature burial. The fear of being buried alive
became a public issue after Jacques-Bénigne Winslow, Professor of Anatomy in Paris, published in 1740 a paper on the uncertainty of the signs of death: absence of pulse or breathing were not to be taken as definite marks – the onset of putrefaction alone was a reliable indicator of irreversible dissolution. ‘Lifeless’ patients who could not safely be declared dead should be subjected to resuscitation procedures: tickling the nose with a quill, shrieking into the ears, cutting the soles of the feet with razors, inserting needles under the nails or thrusting a hot poker up the anus. Burial should be delayed.

Increasingly, the dying left explicit requests to ensure that they were not buried alive. Some asked for their hearts to be cut out, others to be embalmed. Miss Beswick, an elderly lady who died in Manchester, left 20,000 guineas to her doctor, Charles White, on condition that she was never buried.

Fired by experience with the apparently drowned and the prematurely buried, bold spirits mooted the taboo prospects of actually bringing people back from the dead, for instance through electric shocks. In this connexion, Galvani’s celebrated experiments proved particularly ‘galvanizing’. In 1792 this Italian naturalist described experiments in which the legs of dead frogs were suspended by copper wire from an iron balcony; as the feet touched the iron uprights, the legs twitched. These sensational experiments – life seemingly being restored to the incontrovertibly dead – were followed up by his younger contemporary Alessandro Volta. The connexions between electricity and the stuff of life implied by such researches proved highly charged, to say nothing of the apparent blasphemy involved in the possibility of ‘resurrection’ by human means.

Such Promethean hopes came to experimental fruition on humans in London on 17 January 1803, when Giovanni Aldini applied galvanic electricity to the corpse of the murderer Thomas Forster, whose newly hanged body had been rushed from Newgate to an anatomy theatre. When wires attached to a galvanic pile were hooked up to the criminal’s mouth and ear, ‘the jaw began to quiver,’ so it was reported, ‘the adjoining muscles were horribly contorted, and the left eye actually opened.’ Applied to the ear and rectum, the wires
‘excited in the muscles contractions much stronger… as almost to give an appearance of re-animation’. Such experiments encouraged literary and artistic fantasies in the Gothic mode, most celebratedly in Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
(1818), which pursued the idea not of reanimation but of creating life out of inert matter
de novo
.

All such endeavours – from reviving the drowned to reanimating the dead – heightened speculation as to precisely what death was. What it
signified
had always been crystal clear to Christians: the portal to life eternal, and theologians had taught that death occurred thanks to the soul leaving the body. But medicine and science had traditionally been relatively reticent about specifying the nature of death, or what exactly happened at the moment of extinction. In the context of apparent death by drowning, especially, questions now arose about the timing and mechanism of the separation of body from soul, and about what we would call near-death experiences.

The eminent doctor John Fothergill offered his ‘Observations’ on a case reported by a surgeon who had inflated the lungs of a man suffocated by fumes in a coal mine, thus restoring him to life. The Quaker physician stressed the usefulness of what would later be called artificial respiration in cases of suffocation from noxious vapours, drowning, lightning, and so forth. To know whether an individual were truly a victim, death’s signs had to be known, and its mechanisms understood. ‘It does not seem absurd’, he taught,

to compare the animal machine to a clock; let the wheels whereof be in never so good order, the mechanism complete in every part, and wound up to the full pitch, yet without some impulse communicated to the pendulum, the whole continues motionless… Inflating the lungs, and by this means communicating motion to the heart, like giving the first vibration to a pendulum, may possibly, in many cases, enable this something to resume the government of the fabric, and actuate its organs afresh… this case suggests, viz. the possibility of saving a great many lives, without risking any thing.

Through such speculations, death was beginning to be stripped of its mystery.

Might the ‘dead’ themselves have something to report? Narratives had occasionally been published of coma and prolonged sleep. Every year on his birthday, a certain Nicholas Hart – so an early eighteenth-century pamphlet related – was wont to fall so deeply asleep that he could not be awakened. His long sleeps captured the attention of ‘Divines, Scholars, Gentlemen, and Physicians’ who congregated to attend his awakening and sat ‘about his Bed, to hear and take down what he would say when he came out of his trance’. Hart told them that his long sleep coincided with a journey of his soul into the afterlife: brought to the gates of heaven, he had attended the judgement of the souls of the newly dead. For five days a year Hart was thus turned into a prophet – or some said, a charlatan.

When physicians associated with the Royal Humane Society came to ponder and write up ‘near-death’ experiences, however, their framework was different from Hart’s pious narrative, for they dwelt upon matters physiological and pathological. The more materialist doctors involved with the Society claimed that the air (oxygen) or electricity effective in recovering the quasi-dead indicated that the principle of life lay in those substances. The implication that such rescues could be used as ‘natural experiments’ into the nature of life and death was, in turn, deprecated by conservative churchmen, fearful of a medical take-over of one of the Christian mysteries. Certain radicals linked the rescue of the apparently dead to the resurrection of Christ; the orthodox deplored such thinking as blasphemy.

Amid such medico-scientific speculations, the cultural aspects of death were also coming under scrutiny. Despite the expunging of purgatory from Protestant theology, popular lore continued to hold that the soul remained in contact with the body for a while after death and that the behaviour of family and friends could affect the fate of the dead person’s soul. In this belief lay one reason why the corpse remained at home until the funeral, during which time respectful visitors partook of specially prepared food and drink, often placed directly on the coffin. ‘Watching’ a corpse, or keeping vigil prior to burial, remained an important mark of respect, and ‘waking’ was popular in Irish, Welsh and Scottish communities, a noisy
ceremony staged on the eve of the funeral, supposed to protect the corpse from evil spirits – as well as providing emotional release.

Deathbed folklore treated of the departure of the soul from the dying person. A wraith, disguised as a small animal, might first appear as a herald of death. The soul was widely thought to fly off in the shape of a bird. A corpse which failed to manifest rigor mortis was particularly feared as a mark of an unquiet spirit, and such ‘undead’ beings might stir, leading to disrupted graves (explaining why suicides were buried at crossroads, outside consecrated ground, with a stake through their heart: to prevent their souls from ‘walking’). To prevent such commotions, ‘sin-eaters’ might be employed to remove the sins of the departed. ‘In the county of Hereford,’ reported the seventeenth-century antiquary John Aubrey,

it was an old custom at funerals to hire poor people, who were to take upon them the sins of the party deceased… The manner was that when the corpse was brought out of the house and laid on the bier, a loaf of bread was brought out and delivered to the sin-eater, over the corpse, as also a mazard bowl of maple, full of beer (which he was to drink up), and sixpence in money, in consideration whereof he took upon him,
ipso facto
, all the sins of the defunct and freed him or her from walking after they were dead.

Not least, ghosts remained a powerful force in popular culture – indeed, as we have seen, such élite figures as Joseph Glanvill, Henry More and other fellows of the Royal Society went ghost-hunting in expectation that authenticated sightings would give scientific backing to the existence of the spiritual realm, confuting Hobbesian ‘atheism’.

Enlightenment thinking brought detached analysis, however, of all such associations, cultural accretions and ‘superstitions’ connected with the dying process. Comparative accounts were complied of divergent practices at different times and places, so as to lay bare the underlying rationales and psychological constraints. In his
Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews
(1787), the Anglican divine and Hebrew scholar Robert Lowth advanced radical speculations on the origins of beliefs about dying and the afterlife. Affirming naturalistically that ‘the incorporeal world’ had its source in ‘things corporeal and
terrestrial’, he held that the ancient Hebrews’ understanding of death emerged from mundane reflections on the condition and resting place of corpses. The Jews derived their ideas of the afterlife, he stressed, from ‘what was plain and commonly understood concerning the dead, that is, what happened to the body’. Since it was plain that ‘after death the body returned to the earth, and that it was deposited in a sepulchre… a sort of popular notion prevailed among the Hebrews, as well as among other nations, that the life which succeeded the present was to be passed beneath the earth’. The Jewish idea of an afterlife was but a ghostly, or fantasized, version of the condition of the body after death, while the dark world of Sheol, the descriptions of the souls inhabiting it, and the journeys of the dead to the pit, were poetic elaborations on the disposition of the body in the grave. In other words, the key to religious myths about death and immortality lay in recognition that the source of all spiritual imagery was the corpse, as mediated through speech and funerary ceremonies. Rather radically for a divine, Lowth thus implied that Judaeo-Christian teachings about death and the afterlife were rationalizations of interment practices, not
vice versa
.