Death down under | |
Australian ways of death: A social and cultural history 1840-1918. Pat Jalland. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2002 (vi + 378pp). ISBN 0 19 550754 1. |
It is significant that
a publisher should send a history book of nearly 400 pages to a medical journal for review. Presumably they did so in the belief that doctors of today would or should be interested in the past, and in death. In fact, historical perspectives rarely get much of an airing in most domains of modern societies, least of all in medicine, and death is often an unwelcome topic. This is a shame, because this book provides real food for the journey of life, and medicine. The author is a Professor of History at the Australian National University who draws on extensive knowledge of documents of the era. She reminds us how hard life was then by chronicling the heartache of deaths on the long sea voyage from the British Isles, the unthinkable (by modern standards) death rates of children and women in childbirth, and the fate of lone adults and the elderly dying far from home and family. Not that things were much better for the poor and destitute in the mother country, but the harshness of life in the new colony and the alienation from home added another dimension to loss and grief. There are wonderful, albeit almost unbearably sad, descriptions of grief, especially for dead children. One mother is quoted as writing: Why should I grieve for that which is not mine, Why should I mourn for what was lent, but for a time. (p 71).There are many reminders that the human condition changes little, and that wisdom, for example about grief, does not emanate from contemporary thought. Alfred Deakin seemed ahead of his time in offering a young male friend grieving his wife’s death: Manly loving help...meant intensely and meant well. (p 171)Predictably, religious consolation was widely sought and found, but became less certain and widespread as the years passed, taking a real beating with the huge losses of World War I. Spiritual preparation for death was accorded high importance in the 19th century (the old medieval ars moriendi lives on), and many saw suffering as a facilitator of salvation. A Christian burial was of great concern, as witnessed by the anxieties expressed about burial at sea and paupers’ funerals. Of particular interest from a palliative care perspective is that institutionalisation of death is shown to be well established in Australia by the 1920s, and not later as often stated, and those dying of cancer were not favoured by institutes for the destitute. Michael Ashby
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