Facing the "King of Terrors": Death and Society in an American Community, 1750-1990 (review)

Robert V. Wells. Facing the "King of Terrors": Death and Society in an American Community, 1750-1990. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. xiv + 301 pp. Ill. $44.95.

This book is the work of a well-known demographer turned social historian. It is, in fact, a comprehensive review of attitudes and practices pertaining to death in Schenectady, New York, using the source materials and methodologies of both disciplines. It reconstructs the personal experiences of death from a wealth of diaries, letters, and other documents, and it builds up its account of the quantitative aspects of death in the community through such means as the study of gravestones and the careful examination of registers and records--of churches, undertaking firms, the press, and other public and social institutions. All in all, the author's blend of prose text with photographs, maps, and statistical tables is both informative and visually interesting.

Wells has framed his study of death attitudes in Schenectady within the context of a number of broader historical interpretations of the subject by Robert Lifton, Philippe Ariès, David Stannard, and other twentieth-century scholars. In his first chapter, he summarizes the salient points of each of those scholars, focusing on their identification of characteristic death rites and attitudes during particular time spans over the centuries. These points then provide the themes for much of Wells's organization and discussion of material in his subsequent chapters.

This is a thoughtful and important study of a universal phenomenon. While it is set in Schenectady, many of its ramifications and findings about death could readily apply to other American cities. Among other high points, I found the chapter on the Civil War, with its extensive personal diary extracts, to be particularly gripping and historically valuable. I was also impressed by the author's various accounts of both communal and private mourning in Schenectady for the deaths of presidents and other national figures. The volume includes short but useful sections on public health and communicable diseases in Schenectady, information that Wells compiled mainly from official city documents. By contrast, he draws very little from medical sources or from the experiences of physicians with deaths. He also refers only in passing to the phenomenon of a growing medicalization of death in the city's twentieth-century hospitals.

Wells has a style that is both didactic and clear. His work here is highly systematic and carefully organized, while he has a strong penchant for classifying. He also comes across as a piler-on of essentially duplicate material. His book would have been still better if he had made it more selective.

James H. Cassedy
National Library of Medicine

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