Speaking of Death: Can Religion Find its Voice at a Secular Deathbed?
Lydia Dugdale, M.D., Assistant Professor, Associate Director of Program for Biomedical Ethics, Yale School of Medicine
The practice of medicine has conventionally been understood to be an art. Care of patients is nuanced; patients receive different treatments for the same condition. Doctors explain identical information about a medical condition and its expected course differently, depending on the patient. Medicine is an art precisely because its application requires careful attention to, and an evolving relationship with, its subject – the patient.
If each of medicine’s subjects has a particular history and set of beliefs and experiences, it is perplexing that medicalized deaths appear so similar. Why do so many patients die after protracted stays in intensive care units, the seeming victims of medical advance rather than its grateful recipients? The coldness of the hospital bed, the brightness of the neon lights overhead, the hospital’s dilution of religious traditions, and the endless manipulation of the unnamed dying body all seem to have stripped the medicalized dying process of its art. In the twenty-first century, medicine may be an art for the living, but it does not seem to be an art for the dying.
The dying process has not always been this way. On the heels of the fourteenth-century Bubonic Plague in Europe, the Catholic Church issued a series of texts – something akin to “how-to” manuals – on the preparation for death. These booklets described the prayers, protocols, and practices for care of the dying. They assigned tasks to all members of the community, tasks which were meant to be rehearsed over a lifetime. The central theme of this Ars moriendi, or “art of dying” literature, was that you die the way you live. And in order to die well, you have to live well. One’s community – understood for more than 500 years as a faith community –provided the space for the instruction and cultivation of this art.
In May of 2015, MIT Press published the book Dying in the Twenty-First Century, which explores what it would mean to reinvigorate an art of dying. In it, a dozen physicians, theologians, ethicists, and philosophers wrestle with what various aspects of the Ars moriendi would look like in the present day. Its conclusions are halting and cautiously optimistic. Is there any hope for reclaiming an art of dying if academic medical centers and their associated hospices avoid the richness and particularities of religious traditions?
In an era when science, health, and the practices of care might be perceived to be distancing themselves from, rather than approaching the sacred, this panel will grapple with whether it is possible to speak meaningfully and substantively about an art of dying in our modern, secular, and plural health care institutions. Panelists include the book’s editor, a journalist and former hospice volunteer, a palliative care internist in an academic medical center, and a Christian ethicist and hospice coordinator.
The practice of medicine has conventionally been understood to be an art. Care of patients is nuanced; patients receive different treatments for the same condition. Doctors explain identical information about a medical condition and its expected course differently, depending on the patient. Medicine is an art precisely because its application requires careful attention to, and an evolving relationship with, its subject – the patient.
If each of medicine’s subjects has a particular history and set of beliefs and experiences, it is perplexing that medicalized deaths appear so similar. Why do so many patients die after protracted stays in intensive care units, the seeming victims of medical advance rather than its grateful recipients? The coldness of the hospital bed, the brightness of the neon lights overhead, the hospital’s dilution of religious traditions, and the endless manipulation of the unnamed dying body all seem to have stripped the medicalized dying process of its art. In the twenty-first century, medicine may be an art for the living, but it does not seem to be an art for the dying.
The dying process has not always been this way. On the heels of the fourteenth-century Bubonic Plague in Europe, the Catholic Church issued a series of texts – something akin to “how-to” manuals – on the preparation for death. These booklets described the prayers, protocols, and practices for care of the dying. They assigned tasks to all members of the community, tasks which were meant to be rehearsed over a lifetime. The central theme of this Ars moriendi, or “art of dying” literature, was that you die the way you live. And in order to die well, you have to live well. One’s community – understood for more than 500 years as a faith community –provided the space for the instruction and cultivation of this art.
In May of 2015, MIT Press published the book Dying in the Twenty-First Century, which explores what it would mean to reinvigorate an art of dying. In it, a dozen physicians, theologians, ethicists, and philosophers wrestle with what various aspects of the Ars moriendi would look like in the present day. Its conclusions are halting and cautiously optimistic. Is there any hope for reclaiming an art of dying if academic medical centers and their associated hospices avoid the richness and particularities of religious traditions?
In an era when science, health, and the practices of care might be perceived to be distancing themselves from, rather than approaching the sacred, this panel will grapple with whether it is possible to speak meaningfully and substantively about an art of dying in our modern, secular, and plural health care institutions. Panelists include the book’s editor, a journalist and former hospice volunteer, a palliative care internist in an academic medical center, and a Christian ethicist and hospice coordinator.