Focusing on the revelation of Epicurean thanatology in the third book of On the Nature of Things, this essay argues that the most vehement strains of Lucretius’ diatribe against the fear of death are a polemic against kitsch. It explicates the pervasively frank, anti-kitsch stance of Epicureanism and explores how Lucretius combats kitsch, even as kitsch was enthusiastically circulated in other Roman contexts in the form of Epicurean objects and clichés. In the vignettes of the departed father and the maudlin drinkers in DRN 3, Lucretius draws our attention to the way that kitsch (the image of the stereotypically sweet children, the trite lamentation, the pseudo-philosophy, the falseness) occludes reality. The denunciation of kitsch is fundamental to Epicurean teaching: to deny that our metaphorical city has penetrable walls and to bemoan the eventuality of one’s own death is to refuse the nature of things.

This chapter charts the ultimate triumph of the emotional regime of scientific modernity in the form of antisepsis, Joseph Lister’s application of germ theory to surgical practice. It begins by exploring the ways in which antisepsis eliminated the patient as an emotional agent in surgery. The 1860s saw profound concern within surgery about the devastating impact of sepsis on post-operative mortality. Many of the explanations provided for this phenomenon rested on long-standing ideas about the role of the patient’s constitution and emotional state in regulating their post-operative health. However, by focusing purely on the condition of the wound, and the need to keep it free of ‘germs’, Lister’s antisepsis effectively overwrote these explanations, rendering patient subjectivity largely meaningless. At the same time, however, if emotions no longer possessed any ontological significance in surgery, the second part of this chapter demonstrates that they nonetheless played a powerful rhetorical function, as this ‘new world of surgery’ was configured in highly sentimentalised terms. This sentimentality not only served to counter widespread popular anxieties about surgery’s moral character, but also constructed Lister, the ultimate scientific surgeon and the emotional template for surgical modernity, as a quasi-divine saviour.

Focusing on the revelation of Epicurean thanatology in the third book of On the Nature of Things, this essay argues that the most vehement strains of Lucretius’ diatribe against the fear of death are a polemic against kitsch. It explicates the pervasively frank, anti-kitsch stance of Epicureanism and explores how Lucretius combats kitsch, even as kitsch was enthusiastically circulated in other Roman contexts in the form of Epicurean objects and clichés. In the vignettes of the departed father and the maudlin drinkers in DRN 3, Lucretius draws our attention to the way that kitsch (the image of the stereotypically sweet children, the trite lamentation, the pseudo-philosophy, the falseness) occludes reality. The denunciation of kitsch is fundamental to Epicurean teaching: to deny that our metaphorical city has penetrable walls and to bemoan the eventuality of one’s own death is to refuse the nature of things.