History of suicide : voluntary death in Western culture
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
History of suicide : voluntary death in Western culture
（Medicine & culture / series editor Sander L. Gilman）
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001
- : pbk
- Other Title
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Histoire du suicide : la société occidentale face à la mort volontaire
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [329]-372) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
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.
Table of Contents
Contents: Introduction Part I: Tradition: A Repressed Question Chapter 1: Suicide in the Middle Ages: Nuances Chapter 2: The Legacy of the Middle Ages: Between Madness and Despair Chapter 3: The Classical Heritage: Perfecting the Timely Exit Part II: The Renaissance: A Question Raised, Then Stifled Chapter 4: The Early Renaissance: Rediscovery of the Enigma of Suicide Chapter 5: To Be or Not To Be: The First Crisis of Conscience in Europe Chapter 6: The Seventeenth Century: Reaction and Repression Chapter 7: Substitutes for Suicide in the Seventeenth Century Part III: The Enlightenment: Suicide Updated and Guilt-Free Chapter 8: The Birth of the English Malady, 1680-1720 Chapter 9: The Debate on Suicide in the Enlightenment: From Morality to Medicine Chapter 10: The Elite: From Philosophical Suicide to Romantic Suicide Chapter 11: The Common People: The Persistence of Ordinary Suicide Epilogue: From the French Revolution to the Twentieth Century, or, From Free Debate to Silence
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