Book contents
6 - Death and Dying
from Part I - History and Medicine
Summary
The physician should be the minister of hope and comfort to the sick, that by such cordials to the drooping spirit, he may soothe the bed of death, revive expiring life, and counteract the depressing inl uence of those maladies which often disturb the tranquility of the most resigned in their last moments.
– The 1847 American Medical Association Code of EthicsAbstract
This chapter explores the social and cultural history of death and dying in the west. Beginning with a discussion of how life and death were understood in antiquity, it examines the medieval ideal of the “tame death”; the plague’s contribution to early modern images of death as the “king of terrors”; the eighteenth-century Enlightenment’s growing interest in the precise, scientific nature of death; the nineteenth-century Victorian romanticization of and denial of death; and the increasing “medicalization” of death in the twentieth century. Then, with a focus on contemporary end-of-life issues in America, it considers some of the questions facing us when we think about how we die and what it means to die in the twenty-first century.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Medical Humanities , pp. 104 - 120Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014