Facing Death: Where Culture, Religion, and Medicine Meet - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0300076673 ISBN 13: 9780300076677

Publisher: Yale University Press, 1998

Synopsis

We have learned a great deal in recent years about keeping death at bay through medical technology. We are less well informed, however, about how to face death and how to understand or articulate the emotional and spiritual needs of the dying. This profound and eloquent book brings together medical experts and distinguished authorities in the humanities to reflect on medical, cultural, and religious responses to death. The book helps both medical personnel and patients to view death less as an adversary and more as a defining part of life.

In the first half of the book, physicians and the founder of Connecticut Hospice discuss the current clinical setting for dying, with attempts to find the balance between alleviating suffering and providing life support, the problem of finding a peaceful death, and the differences the AIDS epidemic has made in our attitudes toward dying. In the second half of the book, theologians, historians of religion, anthropologists, literary scholars, and pastors describe Christian, Judaic, Islamic, Hindu, and Chinese perceptions of death and rituals of mourning. An epilogue considers the resonances between medicine and the humanities, as well as the essential differences in their approaches to death.

About this title

From Library Journal:

Today, dying is too often a medical and legal event rather than a natural part of life. In 1994, Yale University's Program for Humanities in Medicine and Boston's Goethe Institute brought together distinguished healthcare professionals, philosophers, historians, and clergy to explore the emotional and spiritual aspects of death. This outstanding collection of conference papers offers rich, thoughtful, often highly personal reflections on the conflict between technologically adept, life-saving medicine and the desire for a meaningful death. Physicians describe their experiences as witnesses to death?their anger and frustration when treatments fail and the pressure to cure that leaves no time for grief. Contributors also consider the meaning death can bring to the lives of the dying and survivors and explore its expression in different times and cultures. This exceptional book defines the 20th century's changing attitudes toward ars moriendi?the way of dying. Highly recommended.?Karen McNally Bensing, Benjamin Rose Inst. Lib., Cleveland, Ohio
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review:

"How startling to the modern reader! How unusual for us, with our crash carts, defibrillators, and morphine drips, to come upon a woman who is eager to be thoroughly present in the moment of her dying, for whom dying is a sacred event, full of transcendent meaning."  D. Barnard, NEJM

About this edition

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0300076673
• ISBN 13: 9780300076677
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256
• Editor: Spiro Howard, Wandel Lee Palmer, Curnen Mary G. McCrea