Preventing hospitalization: home hospice nurses, caregivers, and shifting notions of the good death

Leich, Jennifer

doi:10.1016/s0275-4959(00)80029-0

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 11 publications

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“…While some critics have charged that pain management has overshadowed the psychodynamic and religious acceptance of death (Bradshaw 1996), relatives and the dying patient still have to ‘assent’ to the ideology of hospice care aimed at a particular kind of good death. Thus, for example, while hospice workers might take pride in facilitating the smoking habit of a dying patient (Parker‐Oliver 1999–2000: 508), relatives are instructed not to call an ambulance in a crisis and possibly negating the cost‐savings of hospice care (Leich 2000). Even the sequence of saying goodbyes is optimalised in hospice care.…”

Section: Dying In the Hospitalmentioning

confidence: 99%

Death brokering: constructing culturally appropriate deaths

Timmermans

2005

Sociology Health & Illness

114

105

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Death brokering refers to the activities of medical authorities to render individual deaths culturally meaningful. Social scientists and others agree that mortality provokes existential ambiguity in modern life requiring cultural coping mechanisms. In contemporary Western societies, medical professionals have sequestered the dying in institutions, and have classified the causes of death to explain suspicious death. Over the last decades, the institutionalisation of the dying process has been challenged by social movements and the sudden onset of some deaths while forensic medicine has struggled for professional legitimacy in the borderland between mainstream medicine and the legal system. I argue that medical death brokering persists in spite of challenges because medical experts offer increasingly flexible cultural scripts to render the end-of-life socially meaningful while accentuating death's existential ambiguity. Medical professionals help create the ambiguity they promise to resolve, reinforcing the cultural need for more expert death brokering.

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Section: Dying In the Hospitalmentioning

confidence: 99%