Death in War and Peace: Loss and Grief in England, 1914-1970 (review)

Does life have to be, as Thomas Hobbes would have it, "nasty, brutish, and short"? Not according to the "immortalists" in our midst. I am not referring to those who believe that the souls of "true believers" (of any number of religions) will be rewarded with eternal life in the hereafter. Rather, modern immortalists are cryonics, an elite band of men and women who have paid a minimum of $29,250 to have their bodies cooled and preserved in liquid nitrogen immediately after death, in preparation for a physical resurrection here on earth in the future.

The birth-myth of the cryonic movement typically begins with Robert Ettinger's brush with mortality as a soldier during the Second World War. Its youthful manifesto emerged in the 1960s, when Ettinger published The Prospect of Immortality (1962) and the first immortalist societies were established, and it entered into early adulthood with the opening of the Cryonics Institute in 1976. Its webpage (http://www.cryonics.org) claims that cryonics is "the only alternative to the despair of death and disease. A new technology of life potentially without limits. But please—don't wait too long. That can be fatal, and often has been." Alas, very few people have heeded its warning. Active members often blame their lack of popularity on the fact that most people feel uncomfortable thinking about death, let alone planning for the treatment of their bodies after "deanimation."

In this thoughtful analysis of death in England between the beginning of the First World War and 1970, historian Pat Jalland does not mention this small, death-defying movement, but her entire book identifies the increased suppression of knowledge about death and dying as the chief characteristic of British life in the twentieth century. Perhaps the most original part of the study addresses one of the reason the cryonics movement failed: many people were simply skeptical about the assumption that prolonged life will bring happiness. This is brought out most strongly in the euthanasia debates, which gained public attention in the 1930s, only to be reduced to a whisper in the 1950s, becoming audible again from the 1960s. Jalland carefully traces the relative strength of these campaigns and provides a number of plausible reasons for their rise and fall. The 1930s advocates—which included luminaries such as Vera Brittain, H. G. Wells, G. B. Shaw, and G. M. Trevelyan, as well as some prominent physicians—were responding to a dramatic doubling of cancer deaths in the previous thirty years, as well as a new awareness of the inadequacies of care for the dying. The scandalous use of euthanasia by the Nazis effectively squashed any hope of the campaign being revived. In the 1960s, however, a new mood could be sensed both in terms of conventional morality and the politics of the body. Jalland draws attention to a range of factors that enabled a revival of the voluntary euthanasia campaign. These include general shifts in attitudes toward issues of life and death. Suicide and abortion (under strict controls) were no longer criminalized; the death penalty had been abolished. By the mid-1960s, well over one-third of physicians supported voluntary euthanasia, under certain circumstances. Within thirty years, this percentage had reached one-half. Even pro-euthanasia physicians, though, proved reluctant to press their case too strongly. After all, by this time, terminal illness was widely regarded as a matter for hospitals, rather than households. In the 1950s, around half of all deaths still took place at home. By the mid-1960s, this had plummeted to 38 percent.

Didn't doctor-induced euthanasia threaten to give too much power over life and death to that profession? It is a question that still plagues debates. Indeed, one of the great values of this book is that it addresses a subject that continues to excite passion in the twenty-first century. With the bodies of young, previously fit men returning on...