Research Catalog

Title

A social history of dying / Allan Kellehear.

Author

Kellehear, Allan, 1955-

Publication

New York : Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Description

x, 297 p.; 23 cm.

Summary

(Publisher-supplied data) Our experiences of dying have been shaped by ancient ideas about death and social responsibility at the end of life. From Stone Age ideas about dying as otherworld journey to the contemporary Cosmopolitan Age of dying in nursing homes, Allan Kellehear takes the reader on a 2 million year journey of discovery that covers the major challenges we will all eventually face: anticipating, preparing, taming and timing for our eventual deaths. This is a major review of the human and clinical sciences literature about human dying conduct. The historical approach of this book places our recent images of cancer dying and medical care in broader historical, epidemiological and global context. Professor Kellehear argues that we are witnessing a rise in shameful forms of dying. It is not cancer, heart disease or medical science that presents modern dying conduct with its greatest moral tests, but rather poverty, aging and social exclusion.

Subject

• History of Medicine
• Socioeconomic Factors
• Cause of Death > trends
• Attitude to Death
• Death
• Death
• Death > History

Genre/Form

History

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. 257-280) and index.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

The stone age -- The dawn of mortal awareness -- Otherworld journeys: death as dying -- The first challenge: anticipating death -- The pastoral age -- The emergence of sedentism -- The birth of the good death -- The second challenge: preparing for death -- The age of the city -- The rise and spread of cities -- The birth of the well-managed death -- The third challenge: taming death -- The cosmopolitan age -- The exponential rise of modernity -- The birth of the shameful death -- The final challenge: timing death.

ISBN

• 9780521694292
• 0521694299

LCCN

^^2006022375

OCLC

70335130

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library