As science turned mind into brain, it left no site at all for spirit. But now that social and economic forces have forced so much attention on the end of life, we as caregivers need to consider much more explicitly how people die. We must talk more about death itself, and we should talk in public. Among the many signs of reawakening interest are Sherwin Nuland's best-seller and Daniel Callahan's strictures on what should not be done. But few writers have specifically addressed the concerns of physicians and nurses, and that is what the editors hope this collection will do.
Death is as common as birth, but it went into hiding in our twentieth-century hospitals.
Europe was little better, for even there death had replaced sex as the forbidden subject, as several of our contributors pointed out. Sometimes death comes a little earlier or a little later. But warnings by the Puritan divines of New England that we are all in the hands of an angry God who at any moment might let us fall into the fiery furnace get very little attention from their descendants. Death is no longer destiny, but the failure of doctors, written nowhere in God's plan. Death can be repelled, repulsed almost forever - a disease that doctors should be able to cure.