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

The sensuousness that characterized the European Baroque Period (circa 1550–1750) was often mirrored in people's fascination with the juxtaposition of love with death. In what was called "macabre eroticism," much art and literature of the time flamboyantly portrayed necrophilia (sexual intercourse by the living with the dead), although no historian has ever confirmed such incidents.

The fear of apparent death that took root in the seventeenth century resurfaced with great intensity during the eighteenth century. Coffins were built with contraptions to enable any prematurely buried person to survive and communicate from the grave. (See Figure 1.1.)

For the first time, the Christian Church was blamed for hastily burying its "living dead," particularly as it had admonished the general population to abandon "pagan" burial traditions such as protracted mourning rituals. Such traditions were revived in the wake of apparent death incidents.

The Romantic Era

By the late eighteenth century, the European popular notion about death, with its accompanying terror and morbidity, underwent a transformation. Death became romantic and exotic. Influenced by the literary and artistic movements of the time, the concept of death, as well as the perceived beauty of such generally fatal diseases as tuberculosis, left out the possibility of eternal damnation and came to be viewed as a passage to a utopian world where no evil existed.

FIGURE 1.1
The 1882 patent sketch of a device for indicating life in buried people. Defining Death: Medical, Legal and Ethical Issues in the Determination of Death, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1981