At the turn of the century, Edward William Bok, the influential editor of the Ladies Home Journal, decreed to his staff that the magazine’s model home designs would no longer refer to the main social room of the house as the “parlor,” the term that everyone used.
Henceforth, it would be known as the “living room.”
Bok explained his decision to readers in two editorials. With the advent of funeral homes, he said, it was time to end the custom of displaying the open coffins of deceased family members in the parlor before burial. Because families tended to keep a photograph or other remembrance of these melancholy events in the room, sad memories were too readily evoked.
From now on, Bok declared, the central room of the home should emphasize life and the living; it would be better for all concerned if loved ones lay in repose in the homelike parlors provided by undertakers, whose role was to relieve grieving families of the distracting logistics associated with death.
Although it is unclear whether the editor triggered a trend or identified one that was getting under way, the word “parlor” and the commemoration of corpses in private homes would quickly begin to fall out of fashion.
Bok’s push for living rooms and the rise of mortuaries are among the telling moments and movements from our past that are examined in a fascinating television documentary, “Death in America: A Chronological History of Illness and Death.”
Produced and directed by Chicago-area filmmaker J.R. Olivero, it will be aired in two one-hour parts at 8 p.m. on Jan. 13 and Jan. 20 by WYIN, the public TV station in Gary, Ind. (WYIN is carried by several Chicago-area cable systems; information about channel numbers can be found at the end of this article.)
The program’s premise is that some of the most important and dramatic changes in the American way of life have been our beliefs, attitudes and practices regarding sickness, disease and death.
While this may be undoubtedly so, Olivero, 38, of southwest suburban Indian Head Park, nonetheless deserves credit for tackling topics that don’t seem to have the kind of built-in appeal that the Civil War and baseball did for celebrated documentarian Ken Burns.
Yet couldn’t he have called his epic something a little more upbeat?
“That title is why I hesitated so long before screening it,” says Gordon Sroufe, WYIN’s program manager. “But the show is not depressing or maudlin or boring in any way. It draws you in and holds your attention, and it even has humor in it.”
Sroufe pauses, then says, with some wistfulness, “Still, maybe if the title was slightly different . . .”
“Death in America” is Olivero’s first documentary, his attempt to break into a market that he believes will only grow because of the programming needs of cable television. It’s also one of those storied labors of love that, in this case, required three years to complete.
The reason, of course, was money. Olivero began with no foundation grants or corporate funding, which is the lifeblood for many documentaries, and he worked on “spec” — that is, without a buyer or guaranteed outlet.
In addition, he had to fit his shooting and editing schedule around the demands of the family business, World Productions, which he own with his wife, Debbie, and which turns out industrial films for corporations and government agencies.
The fee from WYIN will cover only a small portion of the $435,000 in actual costs and services that went into the project; breaking even or realizing a profit depends on whether other public TV stations decide to pick up the program, which they are eligible to do after the initial telecast.
Inspiring `memorial’ photos
Olivero is hopeful. “The film is more life-affirming than the title suggests,” he says. “If people give it a chance, they’ll see this.”
What they’ll see is a sprawlingly ambitious and ultimately rewarding two hours that is relentlessly informative and on occasion quirky, surprising, preachy and thoughtful — the effort of someone who obviously delights in the full sweep of human triumphs and follies, from the obscure and the bizarre to the momentous and profound.
Olivero was inspired to make the documentary while researching a film for a business client and happening upon a volume titled “Sleeping Beauty.”
It wasn’t the fairy tale. “It was a collection of `memorial’ or post-mortem photography, which was huge in this country for a long time,” he says. “It began in the 1840s and lasted well into this century. It was a wonderful thing, because it allowed every family to have a visual remembrance of their loved ones. In many instances, this was the only image of the person they had.”
Olivero was enthralled by the stories that accompanied the pictures. “They were so touching and unusual. I thought if I hadn’t known about this type of photography, surely a lot of people didn’t. This could be a documentary.”
He contacted Dr. Stanley B. Burns, a New York City eye surgeon and medical historian who composed “Sleeping Beauty” from his internationally recognized collection, which he has used to publish 10 books and mount countless exhibitions.
“I have the largest private historic photographic archive there is. Period. More than 500,000 original prints from the 19th and early 20th Centuries,” asserts Burns, who would become the documentary’s executive producer.
As Olivero gathered information for the film, he became intrigued by the impact and interplay of theology, science, superstition, technology, public policy and cultural myths on our postures toward illness and death, and soon decided to expand the scope of his inquiry.
In the end, “Death in America” spans four centuries of American history, looking at a striking assortment of themes and chapters — the fight against infectious disease and the discovery of the germ theory; the sinking of the Titantic and, in Chicago, the Eastland; the impact of anesthesia; the creation of cemetery parks; the development of embalming; the rejection of the 17th Century Calvinist tenet that mankind was born in sin; and the emergence of the 18th Century belief that children were innocent at birth.
Also noted:
– Child and childbirth mortality. In the early 1800s, we are told, 1 of 6 mothers died in childbirth, more than 25 percent of infants died in their first year, and an additional 50 percent died before age 20. One spouse, usually the wife, was likely to die in the first seven years of marriage. A result was numerous “blended” families and stepparents.
– Grave robbing. For more than two centuries, laws against dissection prevented the legal acquisition of cadavers for anatomy classes in medical schools. In 1788, police in New York City had to suppress an attack on med students for their use of corpses for study. The scarcity prompted a commerce in cadavers by so-called “resurrectionists” who raided fresh graves and caused the well-to-do to hire grave-sitters to guard burial places until enough time passed for the body to begin to decompose. Other measures were booby-trapped coffins, iron coffins, false graves and secret burial places.
The incident that halted these thefts occurred in 1878, when the body of John Scott Harrison, son of former President William Henry Harrison and father of future President Benjamin Harrison, was snatched from a graveyard near Cincinnati and found at the nearby Medical College of Ohio. A national uproar led to laws that made cadavers accessible for science.
– Buried alive. In the late 18th Century, a number of stories about people who were buried alive appeared in the press. The resulting alarm spurred the development of tests to confirm death. Horns were blown in the ears of corpses. Electric shocks were tried. Bells were placed in some coffins.
– The specter of pestilence. Epidemics of yellow fever, smallpox, cholera, typhoid, influenza and other diseases have been frequent and deadly. In 1721, for example, smallpox ravaged Boston; 6,000 of 10,600 inhabitants were thought to have contracted the disease, and some 900 died, more than 8 percent of the population. Development of a vaccine to halt the disease began in 1796. Before 1800, it was estimated that 1 in 5 persons in the country died from smallpox. Inoculation was at first opposed for religious reasons by some, who believed illness was God’s will.
Longer lives
At the very least, viewers of “Death in America” should feel grateful for the progress in controlling disease and extending life expectancy.
“One of the main reasons I supported this documentary was that I believe our society has forgotten its debt to medicine,” Burns says. “In 1850, the life span was about 40 years of age, and by 1900, it was only 47. It’s now about 76, and many of us can look forward to our 80s and 90s in good health.
“Medicine has delivered, but we’ve still got a long way to go. New diseases will come up. There’s no cure for any viral disease, and we’re all alive because of vaccination and antibiotics.
“Yet we’ve gotten very cavalier about what we have. We demand long life, an accident-free life, but we’ve removed personal responsibility. We drink, we don’t wear seat belts, we eat a poor diet, but when we get sick, it’s somebody else’s fault.”
(Consult the Tribune’s TV Week guide for the channel numbers of WYIN, which is carried on 20 Illinois cable systems. Some are: Ch. 19 on TCI cable in Chicago Heights; Ch. 46 on Chicago Cable TV; Ch. 61 on Prime Cable in Chicago; Ch. 51 on the Chicago central region of Cablevision; and Ch. 41 on the Chicago southern region of Cablevision.)
