History of Suicide

Voluntary Death in Western Culture
Revised Auflage
ISBN: 978-0-8018-6647-0
Verlag: Johns Hopkins University Press

Buch, Englisch, 400 Seiten, Format (B × H): 153 mm x 233 mm, Gewicht: 540 g

Reihe: Medicine and Culture

Selected by Choice Magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title

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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Minois, Georges

Weitere Mitwirkende

Cochrane, Lydia G

Fachgebiete

• Medizin | Veterinärmedizin Medizin | Public Health | Pharmazie | Zahnmedizin Medizin, Gesundheitswesen Geschichte der Medizin
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaften Interdisziplinär Thanatologie
• Sozialwissenschaften Psychologie Psychologie / Allgemeines & Theorie Psychologie: Allgemeines
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziale Gruppen/Soziale Themen Tod, Sterbehilfe: Soziale und Ethische Themen

Inhaltsverzeichnis

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

Über Autor(innen)

Cochrane, Lydia G
Lydia G. Cochrane has translated three previous books for Johns Hopkins: On the Edge of the Cliff by Roger Chartier (1996), The Color of Melancholy by Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet (1997), and History of Suicide by Georges Minois (1999). Her other translations include Alain Boureau's The Lord's First Night (1998) and The Myth of Pope Joan (2001), and Renzo Dubbini's Geography of the Gaze (2002).

Georges Minois is the author of fourteen books on topics as diverse as the church and science, the church and war, Henry VIII, and the history of Europe. Lydia G. Cochrane has translated many works, including Roger Chartier's On the Edge of the Cliff for Johns Hopkins.