Singleminded, an ezine devoted to politics, religion, and society. Those words ring as true today as they did then. And yet, for us moderns, death has taken on subtleties and gradations that were unknown during Bacon's era. In those days, you were either of the quick or the dead. Nowadays, death is not such a simple matter.
Paramedics routinely bring people back from the dead by jump-starting a stalled heart beat.
We accept the concept of brain death, where the brain ceases to work but the heart and other vital organs continue to function, keeping the physical body alive. We have living wills that instruct doctors not to use life-support equipment. The Grim Reaper has traded in his scythe for a laptop so that he can keep track of each person's death preferences. In the process of all this deconstruction of death, we have lost some of the fear associated with death. We have discovered that there are indeed many fates worse than death.