Boudaries of the Self; Crises of Mind and Body

Georges Minois. History of Suicide: Voluntary Death in Western Culture. Lydia Cochrane, trans. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). Pp. 400. $20.95 paper.

Jean Stenger and Anne Van Neck. Masturbation: The History of a Great Terror . Kathryn Hoffmann, trans. (New York: Palgrave, 2001). Pp. 240. $24.95 cloth.

Philip Wilson. Surgery, Skin and Syphilis: Daniel Turner's London (1667-1744) (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999). Pp. 328. $89.00 cloth.

All three of these books attempt to recreate the mentality of the seventeenth and eighteenth century but each employs a different angle of vision on the age. George Minois writes with a subtle viewpoint about suicide. Taking an existential stance on both suicide and euthanasia as aspects of human freedom in need of open discussion, he gently directs the reader toward admiring complex attitudes. Jean Stenger and Anne Van Neck, writing on masturbation, unmercifully belabor the anonymous author of Onania and Samuel-Auguste Tissot as perpetrators of a hoax about the evils of masturbation—a hoax that invented the specter of a nonexistent illness that terrified Europe for two centuries. In contrast, Philip Wilson attempts to treat the life and medical career of Daniel Turner from what might be thought of as the view of a contemporary. For example, he refuses to criticize the often absurd treatments of syphilis that read like the bewildering solutions to the meaning of the ocean of Solaris in Stanislaus Lem's novel of that name. Instead, he allows us to view the theories from the standpoint of a contemporary trying to choose between bewildering theories. As someone who grew up in a family that believed that marks on the face of an infant were produced by the imagination of the mother (a theory championed by Daniel Turner), that suicide was always the product of insanity, and that masturbation produced permanent debility, I find all of these works fascinating.

"'Suicide spoils everyone's fun'; it perturbs social equilibrium, and it undermines the self-confidence of a society that feels guilty, or at least under accusation." Georges Minois's quotation from and observation upon Frédéric Zenati's article in a law journal sums up the problems that suicide raises in modern society. As Minois suggests, the modern reaction is relatively muted. During the Middle Ages and Renaissance in Western Europe, this sense of guilt was turned upon the corpse itself, which, after a trial, was often treated as the worst of criminals. The body was dragged through the streets on a hurdle, hanged upside down, pierced with a stake and buried at a crossroad or alongside the road. The goods of the dead person were confiscated by the state, often leaving his widow and children penniless. Though it had been used in its Latin derivation, the term "suicide" did not appear in English until the seventeenth century. Before that the term was "self" murder, and murder was an offense against religion, the state and society.

Minois's book draws a great deal of factual material from previous works such as Michael Mac Donald's and Terence Murphy's Sleepless Souls (1990) and Albert Bayet's Le Suicide et le Morale (1922). But unlike such works, it maintains a consistent attitude toward suicide. Although suicide is always anathema to the state and society, it is an existential, private act, which should not be punished in any way by organized society or by religious organizations. Although it is never easy to accept, modern debates over euthanasia are often as benighted as the punishments inflicted upon the corpse during early centuries. MacDonald and Murphy see a gradual amelioration in the treatment of suicide in England, but writing from a French perspective, Minois sees a closing of debate on the subject in recent decades.

It is that very debate and examination that is crucial. After a careful analysis of Hamlet's famous soliloquy, which is quoted as a motto at...