Zdánlivá smrt jako kulturotvorný fenomén

• Authors: Grubhoffer Václav

Title variants

EN

APPARENT DEATH AS A CULTURE-FORMING PHENOMENON

• Languages of publication: CS

Abstracts

EN

The present paper deals with the category of so-called apparent death which is closely connected with the history of medicine of the second half of the 18th century. Present-day European historiographical research shows that at the latest in the 1740s the leaders of medical discourse began to be concerned with the temporal status of biological death. The central question was how to determine conclusively that death had occurred, which permitted the burial of the dead person. Yet this was also a time when people became more concerned with the possibility that individuals might not have died and could recover by themselves. The more modern medicine progressed, however, the more people listened to anecdotal evidence about apparent deaths and premature burials. During the second half of the 18th century this originally medical issue crossed the boundaries of scholarly discourse, among other things, as a result of medical treatises being published in national languages, and became a real nightmare of the Enlightenment. Nineteenth-century poets such as Edgar Allen Poe explored this topic in great depth, starting from the assumption that people generally feared being buried while being still alive.

Keywords

EN

apparent death; history of medicine; Enlightenment; premature burial

Discipline

• HISTORY: HISTORY

• Publisher: Charles University in Prague, Faculty of Arts, Czech Republic
• Journal: Historie – Otázky – Problémy (History, Issues, Problems)
• Year: 2019
• Volume: 11
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 177-189

Contributors

author

Grubhoffer Václav

• Ústav romanistiky Filozofické fakulty Jihočeské univerzity v Českých Budějovicích