History of Suicide: Voluntary Death in Western Culture (Medicine and Culture) - Softcover

Minois, Georges

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0801866472 ISBN 13: 9780801866470

Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

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).

Edition details

• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0801866472
• ISBN 13: 9780801866470
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 400