October 10, 1997: Volume 41, Number 3

Prof. Wells Views Changing Culture of Death

"Robert V. Wells examines life through a lens of death."

So begins an Associated Press story running this month on the national wire.

Wells, the Chauncey H. Winters Professor of History and Social Science, has spent the last decade researching the changing culture of death in Schenectady over its 300-year history.

"It's an important topic in terms of cultural history," he said. "One can see some of the basics of a culture's attitudes about a lot of different things in how they confront death and manage it."

As the community grew, death and funerals shifted from being public events to being private ones. In 1858, he said, one family displayed the body of a child on their front lawn for some 3,000 mourners, an act that would be unthinkable today.

Wells, who this year has a Fulbright Fellowship to teach American history at Odense University in Denmark, used public records like death certificates and eight personal diaries to provide insight into attitudes and customs about death.

Among the most unusual was the diary of Tayler Lewis, a language professor at Union, who mourned the death of a 17-year-old daughter by translating Biblical passages in several different languages. The Civil War-era diary of Lewis' son, Charles, gives a chilling account of Lincoln's assassination, which the writer witnessed at Ford's Theater.

On current attitudes about death, "Some say we are a death-denying culture," Wells said. "I don't think that's quite right. We have a vicarious relationship with death," experiencing it at a distance through television shows, movies and the news. "We lost the vocabulary, but in some ways we are immersed in it."

Wells also was interviewed by National Public Radio.

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