From Diana to Damien Hirst, this is a provocative account of how and why we have tamed the thing we most fear. The end of the death taboo is arguably as important a social revolution as the sexual revolution with which it is compared. But as death becomes the focus of a new permissiveness does it signify healthy liberation? Are ´click and buy´ coffin websites and mourning television indicative of progress, or a waning of sensibility?
In the twentieth century our deaf ear to death mirrored the Victorian blind eye to sex. Vigor Mortis puts the current changes in a historical context, and compares the Victorian commercialisation of death with the contemporary upsurge of consumerism in the funeral trade.
Importantly, it lays to rest the myth that our response to Diana´s death in 1997 was unprecedented, and nails the lid on the idea that death is taboo. Death is in.
