Drowning has always enjoyed mythic power. The Deluge, the sinking of the Titanic, and the drowning of Virginie in J. St Pierre's eighteenth-century bestseller Paul et Virginie (1788), are just some of the memorable drownings that carry with them arresting images of mankind's relation with nature, death, God, and itself. But as a theme in the history of the body, drowning's significance lies not among myths, but in its critical role in the discovery of resuscitation. The possibility of reversing the effects of drowning excited in the late eighteenth century new systematic inquiries into the physiological states and processes of life and death. The implementation of resuscitation, informed by these fresh accounts of the way the body worked, entailed new practices surrounding drowned bodies that in turn required a shift in the way the body carried commonsensical and religious meanings.
The idea that drowning could be ‘cured’ enjoyed little currency in medical literature before the 1760s. However, in late eighteenth-century Europe, with the advent of the Humane Movement, drowning for the first time enjoyed widespread attention as a reversible and preventable accidental death. Before the emergence of medico-philanthropic societies that embodied this movement, rescue and recovery of the drowned was practised, but in a haphazard and limited way characterized by ignorance and fatalism. As champions of the Enlightenment's optimism in science, reason, and progress, the founders of these societies sought more effective and reliable methods. Beginning in Amsterdam in 1767, and spreading in the next 30 years throughout Europe and on to America and the Indian Subcontinent, these organizations publicized methods of recovery from all states of accidental and sudden apparent death, including drowning, strangulation, narcotics, and lightning.
It was drowning that most intrigued those who wanted to explore the latent powers of recovery in a near-dead body. This was for three main reasons. First, it began to be believed that drowning led to a brief suspension of the vital powers, rather than an immediate extinction. In this the drowned body appeared to epitomize a state of ‘apparent death’, a notion that had gained a high profile in Europe following the publication of J.-J. Bruhier's L'incertritude des signes de la mort (Paris, 1742). In this book Bruhier argued that the body could display the signs of death yet spontaneously recover. This argument shed doubt upon the possibility of knowing the moment of death with any precision, and hence made the idea of a ‘suspension’ of life intelligible. Second, because drowning happened to healthy bodies, and did not necessarily involve internal destruction of the organs, or extensive lesions, its reversibility seemed more likely. Third, on the busy European rivers, where drowning was both conspicuous and plentiful, resuscitation could be tested in practice.
The desire to perfect a therapy for drowning led medical men back to the body. The patronage of the Royal Humane Society of London (RHS), founded in 1774, ensured the publication of experimental works, such as Edmund Goodwyn's The Connexion of Life with Respiration (1788), that investigated the effects of drowning on animal bodies. These explorations sought reliable knowledge of the signs of life and death, as well as the mechanical and chemical processes of vitality. Because drowning in humans was impossible to reconstruct experimentally, these researches entailed extensive dissection of freshly drowned puppies and kittens. Here drowning figured as an experimental method and analytical device, which generated new data on respiration and circulation, and provided greater conceptual and empirical clarity about the relationship between states of life and death. This work represented the cutting edge of physiology, but was later eclipsed by the subsequent influence of French morbid anatomist Xavier Bichat, whose definition, in 1800, of life as ‘the totality of functions which resist death’ replaced the Aristotelian notion of death as the absence of life used by Goodwyn.
The new knowledge had to be translated into action if deaths by drowning were actually to be averted. The act of translation was a frictional process for, in exhorting people to change their behaviour towards drowning bodies, the RHS required alterations in popular accounts of the body itself, and these cut across beliefs about how the world was and ought to be. First, to discourage witnesses of drowning from believing that the moment of death had already passed and that further activity was useless, the RHS had to overcome existing assumptions about the signs of death and replace them with the counterintuitive idea of apparent death. Second, the RHS had to override popular reluctance to interfere with the corpse, either for fear of obstructing the law, or for fear that the corpse might bring about bad luck. (Local fishermen in Germany, for example, would not rescue drowning persons for fear of eliciting the wrath of the river spirits.) Third, the RHS had to challenge those ideas about Providence which sat uneasily with the concept of an ‘accidental’ death, and which saw resuscitation as an impious and hubristic activity that, Prometheus-like, mimicked the animating power of God. Clergymen supporting the RHS attacked such charges of impiety, and reinterpreted scriptural accounts of body-soul activity at death to make way for the idea of apparent death. In other words, in order to fashion a cultural ambience favourable to the rescue and revival of a drowning/drowned body, which we take for granted, men and women of the eighteenth century had to unlearn their assumptions about these cosmic, practical, and ethical fundamentals that were mediated by the drowned body.
Interest in resuscitation no longer grips the imagination as it did between 1770 and 1830, when it unleashed a more general interest in reanimation that brought about anaesthesia, blood transfusion, and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818). Consequently, drowning no longer constitutes such a generative locus for new knowledge of, and practices surrounding, the body.
— Luke Davidson
See also near-drowning.
