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Dying in the Twenty-First Century: Toward a New Ethical Framework for the Art of Dying Well

Online ISBN:
9780262328579
Print ISBN:
9780262029124
Publisher:
The MIT Press
Book

Dying in the Twenty-First Century: Toward a New Ethical Framework for the Art of Dying Well

Lydia M.D. Dugdale (ed.)
Lydia M.D. Dugdale
(ed.)
Yale University School of Medicine
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Published:
22 June 2015
Online ISBN:
9780262328579
Print ISBN:
9780262029124
Publisher:
The MIT Press

Abstract

Most of us are generally ill-equipped for dying. Today, we neither see death nor prepare for it. But this has not always been the case. In the early fifteenth century, the Catholic Church published the Ars moriendi texts, which established prayers and practices for an art of dying. In the twenty-first century, physicians rely on procedures and protocols for the efficient management of hospitalized patients. How might we recapture an art of dying that facilitates our dying well? In this book, physicians, philosophers, and theologians attempt to articulate a bioethical framework for dying well in a secularized, diverse society. Contributors discuss such topics as the acceptance of human finitude; the role of hospice and palliative medicine; spiritual preparation for death; and the relationship between community and individual autonomy. They also consider special cases, including children, elderly patients with dementia, and those suffering from AIDS in the early years of the epidemic, when doctors could do little more than accompany their patients in humble solidarity. These chapters make the case that only a robust bioethics—one that could foster both the contemplation of finitude and the cultivation of community–could bring about a modern art of dying well.

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