Death
by
Death can awaken us to the ways we, as individuals and as a culture, create meaning. The health humanities gives practitioners a context in which to locate or rediscover meaning and deepens our capacity to approach end-of-life issues with dying persons and their families with alertness and sensitivity to individual and cultural dynamics. It offers clinicians opportunities for reckoning with guilt and feelings of failure that can accompany the unpreventable losses and for honoring and grieving the dead. Reckoning with historical and current racial and caste inequities in life expectancy can move clinicians to work for change. In the face of death, the health humanities, like ritual, has the potential to restore a sense of human connection and meaning. In some sense, the health humanities returns death to medicine. Medicalization of Death Death, from Old English deaþ, which in turn came from Germanic dauthuz, is a cognate with Old Frisian d_ā_th, d_ā_d, d_ā_t; Old Dutch d_ō_th; Old High German t_ō_d; Old Icelandic dauðr; Old Swedish döþer, döþe; and Old Danish døth (OED Online 2022, “death”). The word death, meaning the permanent cessation of life, has remained constant across borders and over time, at least among Euro-American cultures. Its medical definition,...
This essay may be found on page 51 of the printed volume.