Thomas W. Laqueur > Quotes

“The falseness of the seventeenth century became a large measure of the truth by the nineteenth. Money made the man, or at least went a long way toward doing so; and death became the occasion for a final accounting, a stocktaking of worldly success. Of course, there were other metrics: virtue, martyrdom, political standing, fraternal ties. But it took money to publicize them. The funeral became more and more a standardized commodity whose cost could be matched with exquisite precision to the class and degree of 'respectability' of the deceased. When one bought a funeral, one bought a more or less splendid parade, each additional bauble, each horse, each feather or set of nails adding to the base price. Bit by bit, finery accumulated, and by looking at the account books of an undertaker who specialized in pauper funerals, we can begin to see the bounds of decency in death.”
― Thomas W. Laqueur, The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains

“By 1850, the pauper funeral had become perhaps the dominant representation of that vulnerability, of the possibility of falling irrevocably from the grace of society, of exclusion from the values of one's culture. It was an image that worked on the poor; they would, as one observer put it, "sell their beds out from under them sooner than have parish funerals." Anxiety about pauper burial did not, of course, stand alone in drawing - pushing might be the better verb - the poor into industrial civilization, but ignominious burial was one of the most powerful ways in which the relationship between money and standing was made manifest, a metaphor for the meaning of consumption, a vehicle for the creation of desire that made the new economic order possible.”
― Thomas W. Laqueur, The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains

“Onania had legs, as they say in publishing. Even after two of its publishers died, it kept going. But its monopoly on masturbation was short-lived; others moved in to make the private vice ever more public and profitable. Next in the field, in the mid-1720s, was the most successful of London's quack-medicine establishments, led by the famous Mrs. Garroway, scion of the well-known coffeehouse family. From a secure base in "Dr. Chamberlayne's Anodyne Necklace for Children's Teeth" and a subsidiary line that included gout cures, purging sugarplums, ague plasters, saffron drops, and ophthalmic tobacco that the firm made, sold, and advertised lavishly, she branched out into the self-pollution business. The whole array -her new cure for the newly discovered masturbatory disease and the old standbys could be had in London or the provinces, retail and wholesale, in person and by mail. Hundreds of pamphlets, each slightly different from the others, as well as weekly notices in newspapers, spread the fame of this wide-ranging pharmacopoeia and of onanism. In short, others rushed into the niche that Onania had pioneered.”
― Thomas W. Laqueur, Solitary Sex : A Cultural History of Masturbation

“Remarkably, this shameless effort to invent a new disease and at the same time offer its cure at a steep price became the founding text for a medical tradition that would draw in the pillars of high-Enlightenment medicine and help create modern sexuality. Scores of dissertations, hundreds of articles, encyclopedia entries, didactic tracts, and many learned tomes would find their origins in 1712. Almost two hundred years later, when many had come to doubt that masturbation caused serious physical harm, a noted French doctor could still find almost a hundred conditions that were either signs or consequences of self-abuse.”
― Thomas W. Laqueur, Solitary Sex : A Cultural History of Masturbation

“No dirges for my fancied death; No weak lament, no mournful stave; All clamorous grief were waste of breath, And vain the tribute of a grave.”
― Thomas W. Laqueur, The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains