Death Through the Ages: A Brief Overview - The Nineteenth Century

In the nineteenth century premature and lingering deaths remained commonplace. Death typically took place in the home following a lengthy deathbed watch. Family members prepared the corpse for viewing in the home, not in a funeral parlor. However, this practice changed during the late nineteenth century, when professional undertakers took over the job of preparing and burying the dead. They provided services such as readying the corpse for viewing and burial, building the coffin, digging the grave, and directing the funeral procession. Professional embalming and cosmetic restoration of bodies became widely available, all carried out in a funeral parlor where bodies were then viewed instead of in the home.

Cemeteries changed as well. Prior to the early nineteenth century, American cemeteries were unsanitary, overcrowded, weed-filled places bearing an odor of decay. That began to change in 1831 when the Massachusetts Horticultural Society purchased seventy-two acres of fields, ponds, trees, and gardens in Cambridge and built FIGURE 1.1 Device for indicating life in buried persons, 1882Mount Auburn cemetery. This cemetery was to become a model for the landscaped garden cemetery in the United States. These cemeteries were tranquil places where those grieving could visit the graves of loved ones and find comfort in the beautiful surroundings.

Literature of the time often focused on and romanticized death. Death poetry, consoling essays, and mourning manuals became available after 1830, which comforted the grieving with the concept that the deceased were released from worldly cares in Heaven and that they would be reunited there with other deceased loved ones. The deadly lung disease tuberculosis—called consumption at the time—was pervasive during the nineteenth century in Europe and the United States. The disease caused sufferers to develop a certain appearance—an extreme pallor and thinness, with a look often described as haunted—that actually became a kind of fashion statement. The fixation on the subject by writers such as Edgar Allan Poe and the English Romantic poets helped fuel the public's fascination with death and dying. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries the popularization of the "Goth look" is sometimes associated with the tubercular appearance.

Spiritualism

By the mid-nineteenth century the romanticizing of death took on a new twist in America. Spiritualism, in which the living communicated directly with the dead, began in 1848 in the United States with Maggie and Katie Fox of Hydesville, New York. The sisters claimed to have communicated with the spirit of a man murdered by a former tenant in their house. The practice of conducting "sittings" to contact the dead gained instant popularity. Mediums, such as the Fox sisters, were supposedly sensitive to "vibrations" from the disembodied souls that temporarily lived in that part of the spirit world just outside the earth's limits.

This was not the first time people had tried to communicate with the dead. Spiritualism has been practiced in cultures all over the world. For example, many Native Americans believe shamans (priests or medicine men) have the power to communicate with the spirits of the dead. The Old Testament (I Samuel 28:7-19) recounts the visit of King Saul to a medium at Endor who summoned the spirit of the prophet Samuel, which predicted the death of Saul and his sons.

The mood in the United States in the 1860s and 1870s was ripe for Spiritualist séances. Virtually everyone had lost a son, husband, or other loved one during the Civil War (1861–65). Some survivors wanted assurances that their loved ones were all right; others were simply curious about life after death. Those who had drifted away from traditional Christianity embraced this new Spiritualism, which claimed scientific proof of survival after physical death.