Book: The Hour of Our Death
Authors: David Healy
Journal: BMJ (2003)

Philippe Aries was one of the most highly regarded social historians of the second half of the 20th century. His first essays on the history of death appeared in 1975, just when emerging medical capacities to keep people alive on ventilators to the end of the tax year had given a whole new meaning to the biblical adage to render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's. Aware of changing attitudes to death, and wondering if we were facing a radical break with a continuous tradition embodied in the rituals of visiting cemeteries and in piety for the dead, Aries continued his work on this subject, which culminated in 1981 in this book, a work of exciting scholarship and humanity. Exciting because, using the history of large urban cemeteries, ancient funerary practices, notarial records, wills, and works of literature and art, Aries shows that far from there being a continuous tradition regarding death, our current “alienated” forms of death have replaced a relatively short lived tradition of romantic death that started with the Victorians.​Victorians.




Figure 1



Philippe Aries

Oxford University Press 1991 (Alfred A Knopf 1981), pp 651 ISBN 0 19 507364 9

This classic book is currently out of print, but may be available from libraries and online secondhand bookshops

Rating: ★★★★




In contrast, from the early Christian centuries through to the Middle Ages the promise of eternity seems to have shaped considerations of death, leading our ancestors to more or less abandon corpses to the Church. In the Middle Ages a change of culture brought a growing concern with the fear of judgment, which eventually trumped the promise of eternity. The focus on death changed from a communal one to a much more personal one. Previously a good death was one that came on slowly, was anticipated by the sufferer, and took place in the presence of others. A bad death was one that came abruptly, leaving people unable to settle their mental or worldly affairs.

The rise of modern individualism has seen a growing preference for abrupt deaths. The bodily indicators of death that once allowed people to compose themselves and arrange their affairs have been transformed into signs of bodily corruption. A fascination with bodily changes before and after death ultimately issued in a new mythology: the perverse resurrection of vampirism. These changes also set the stage for the increasing role of medicine as a means to stave off the corruption of death. With Tolstoy's Death of Ivan Ilyich we see how the interventions of doctors led to a move from resignation in the face of death to anxiety as to whether the efforts of doctors will succeed in prolonging life.

While Aries illustrates how each of us might have faced death at various points during the last 1500 years, his ultimate interest is in how communities face death. The relatively rapid transformations in our understanding of death reflect our capacity to make myths and to embody these myths in communal and personal memories. This myth making capacity seems even more active—and perhaps is ever more needed—in our modern scientific era. Any juxtaposition of myth and science is unsettling, but this tension finds a resolution within the bigger picture that this book gives, and thus the book is not just a profound work of historical scholarship but also one to consider giving to a friend who has been bereaved. The Hour of Our Death might even appropriately be called a book of consolation, if that word could be stripped of the connotations of piety that have encrusted it in the last 100 years and that have left us unsettled by the changing face of death in our time.