Actuarial Visions of Death: Life, Death and Chance in the Modern World

Abstract

It is, I think, above all through the work of Phillipe Ariès (1967, 1974, 1983, 1985) that we have come to recognise the historically variable forms which social representations of death might take. Ariès, of course, studied representations of death in such widely diverse fields as cemetery architecture, paintings, literary accounts, poems, funerary iconography and funerary ritual. For him, the changing forms of such phenomena revealed historically changing sensibilities toward death in the western world — from the tame and public death of the early Middle Ages to the invisible and forbidden death of the twentieth century. One class of social representation which Ariès did not study, however, was what might be called scientific representations of death, and it is this latter type of representation upon which I wish to concentrate here. Scientific representations emerged out of diverse nineteenth-century scientific sources and may be linked to such phenomena as the rise of anatomical pathology, the development of probability theory and the birth of modern epidemiology. In essence, they were representations of a calculable, and determinate death and to that extent they stand in stark contrast to the vision of random, feckless and capricious death which, according to Huizinga (1924), so haunted the inhabitants of pre-modern Europe.

Of death, and many are the ways that lead

To his grim cave, all dismal …

Milton, Paradise Lost XI 468–9