Tame vs. Medicalized Death The Triumph of Death

1. Medicalized Dying
Definitions & Depersonalization

2. “FROM ‘TAME DEATH’ TO
‘MEDICALIZEDDEATH’

3. “Tame Death” - Definition
• “Simple and public” death, seen as an evil, but “rendered
meaningful by the rituals that surrounded it and by the
companions who attended it.”
• Made people see death as “something more and other than a
crude fact of nature.”

4. • Tame death “happened not only in community but also to the
community.”
• “Death was not tame because nature was benevolent, but
because God was.”
• Eventually replaced by a “‘wild death,’ untamed by ritual or
community.”

5. “Medicalized Death” –
Definitions & Characteristics
• Happens in a hospital
• 1945: 40% of deaths happened in a hospital
• 1995: 90% of deaths happened in a hospital
• People develop a preference for previously dreaded deaths
• No role for the dying – just for the sick
• “…Characterized by the effort to avoid death”
• Even avoiding mentioning it (despite “cultural obsession”)
• Depersonalization
• Body as “me” versus “it”

6. “The Triumph of Death in the
Medicalization of It”
• Death and Our Flesh
• Sickness reminds us that we are our bodies, for better or worse.
• Patients can suffer not only from the disease, but from medicine’s
treatment of it.

7. “The Triumph of Death in the
Medicalization of It”
• Death and Our Communities
• Threatens to separate us from our communities
• The sick are thought to belong elsewhere

8. “The Triumph of Death in the
Medicalization of It”
• Death and God
• Death threatens our relationship with God