Death, Dying, and Modern Technology

Death, Dying, and Modern Technology PDF Author: Enrique Cordero
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781973801498
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 170

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Book Description
Modern technology has blurred the definitions surrounding death and dying. It has cast a veil of doubt upon the idea of discussing end-of-life issues regarding realistic, spiritual, and compassionate choices before or at the end of life. As a result, patients and family members find it increasingly more difficult to make informed decisions at this most difficult time. This self-help guide offers you facts based on research, anecdotes, and suggested reading-all intended to help you make the right choices when navigating the stormy seas that we will all face someday. You will learn the difference between Healthcare Advance Directives and Durable Power of Attorney; the reality of CPR, its many possible complications, and how successful it really is. You will learn the difference between life-support and mechanical ventilation, how modern technology prolongs the dying process. You will understand the reality of the financial impact on dying individuals and their families. You will learn about prolonging life vs. quality of life. You will understand the confusing term, terminal; what it means to hold on or let go; the consequences of withholding the truth from you regarding your illness or outcome, and much more Most importantly, learn to believe in yourself. Learn to empower yourself with knowledge. Your knowledge will arm you with strength and confidence, when making life-changing decisions.

Death, Dying, and Modern Technology

Death, Dying, and Modern Technology PDF Author: Enrique Cordero
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781973801498
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 170

Get Book Here

Book Description
Modern technology has blurred the definitions surrounding death and dying. It has cast a veil of doubt upon the idea of discussing end-of-life issues regarding realistic, spiritual, and compassionate choices before or at the end of life. As a result, patients and family members find it increasingly more difficult to make informed decisions at this most difficult time. This self-help guide offers you facts based on research, anecdotes, and suggested reading-all intended to help you make the right choices when navigating the stormy seas that we will all face someday. You will learn the difference between Healthcare Advance Directives and Durable Power of Attorney; the reality of CPR, its many possible complications, and how successful it really is. You will learn the difference between life-support and mechanical ventilation, how modern technology prolongs the dying process. You will understand the reality of the financial impact on dying individuals and their families. You will learn about prolonging life vs. quality of life. You will understand the confusing term, terminal; what it means to hold on or let go; the consequences of withholding the truth from you regarding your illness or outcome, and much more Most importantly, learn to believe in yourself. Learn to empower yourself with knowledge. Your knowledge will arm you with strength and confidence, when making life-changing decisions.

Technologies of the Human Corpse

Technologies of the Human Corpse PDF Author: John Troyer
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262542315
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
“One of our greatest thinkers” on death presents a radical new approach to thinking about dying and the human corpse (Caitlin Doughty, mortician and bestselling author of Smoke Gets in Your Eyes). A fascinating exploration of the relationship between technology and the human corpse throughout history—from 19th-century embalming machines to 21st-century death-prevention technologies. Death and the dead body have never been more alive in the public imagination—not least because of current debates over modern medical technology that is deployed, it seems, expressly to keep human bodies from dying, blurring the boundary between alive and dead. In this book, John Troyer examines the relationship of the dead body with technology, both material and conceptual: the physical machines, political concepts, and sovereign institutions that humans use to classify, organize, repurpose, and transform the human corpse. Doing so, he asks readers to think about death, dying, and dead bodies in radically different ways. Troyer explains, for example, how technologies of the nineteenth century including embalming and photography, created our image of a dead body as quasi-atemporal, existing outside biological limits formerly enforced by decomposition. He describes the “Happy Death Movement” of the 1970s; the politics of HIV/AIDS corpse and the productive potential of the dead body; the provocations of the Body Worlds exhibits and their use of preserved dead bodies; the black market in human body parts; and the transformation of historic technologies of the human corpse into “death prevention technologies.” The consequences of total control over death and the dead body, Troyer argues, are not liberation but the abandonment of Homo sapiens as a concept and a species. In this unique work, Troyer forces us to consider the increasing overlap between politics, dying, and the dead body in both general and specifically personal terms.

Modern Death

Modern Death PDF Author: Haider Warraich
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1250104580
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
A contemporary exploration of death and dying by a young Duke Fellow who investigates the hows, whys, wheres, and whens of modern death and their cultural significance.

Dying, Death, and Grief in an Online Universe

Dying, Death, and Grief in an Online Universe PDF Author: Carla Sofka, PhD
Publisher: Springer Publishing Company
ISBN: 082610732X
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
Print+CourseSmart

Dying and Death in 18th-21st Century Europe

Dying and Death in 18th-21st Century Europe PDF Author: Marius Rotar
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Pub
ISBN: 9781443855471
Category : FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS
Languages : en
Pages : 496

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Book Description
This book features a selection of the most representative papers presented during the international conference Dying and Death in 18th-21st Century Europe (ABDD). It invites you on a fascinating journey across the last three centuries of Europe, Other death as your guide. The past and present realities of the complex phenomena of death and dying in Romania, the United Kingdom, Bulgaria, Serbia, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, and Italy are dealt Other, by authors from varying backgrounds: ...

Rituals of Death and Dying in Modern and Ancient Greece

Rituals of Death and Dying in Modern and Ancient Greece PDF Author: Evy Johanne Håland
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443868590
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 690

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Book Description
*Winner of the AFS Elli Köngäs-Maranda Prize 2016* Multidisciplinary or post-disciplinary research is what is needed when dealing with such complex subjects as ritual behaviour. This research, therefore, combines ethnography with historical sources to examine the relationship between modern Greek death rituals and ancient written and visual sources on the subject of death and gender. The central theme of this work is women’s role in connection with the cult of the dead in ancient and modern Greece. The research is based on studies in ancient history combined with the author’s fieldwork and anthropological analysis of today’s Mediterranean societies. Since death rituals have a focal and lasting importance, and reflect the gender relations within a society, the institutions surrounding death may function as a critical vantage point from which to view society. The comparison is based on certain religious festivals that are dedicated to deceased persons and on other death rituals. Using laments, burials and the ensuing memorial rituals, the relationship between the cult dedicated to deceased mediators in both ancient and modern society is analysed. The research shows how the official ideological rituals are influenced by the domestic rituals people perform for their own dead, and vice versa, that the modern domestic rituals simultaneously reflect the public performances. As this cult has many parallels with the ancient official cult, the following questions are central: Can an analysis of modern public and domestic rituals in combination with ancient sources tell the reader more about the ancient death cult as a whole? What does such an analysis suggest about the relationship between the domestic death cult and the official? Since the practical performance of the domestic rituals was – and still remains – in the hands of women, it is crucial to discover the extent of their influence to elucidate the real power relations between women and men. This research represents a new contribution to earlier presentations of the Greek “reality”, but mainly from the female perspective, which is highly significant since men produced most of the ancient sources. This means that the principal objective for this endeavour is to question the ways in which history has been written through the ages, to supplement the male with a female perspective, perhaps complementing an Olympian Zeus with a Chthonic Mother Earth. The research brings both ancient and modern worlds into mutual illumination; its relevance therefore transcends the Greek context both in time and space.

The Way We Die Now

The Way We Die Now PDF Author: Seamus O'Mahony
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1784974250
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
We have lost the ability to deal with death. Most of our friends and beloved relations will die in a busy hospital in the care of strangers, doctors and nurses they have known at best for a couple of weeks. They may not even know they are dying, victims of the kindly lie that there is still hope. They are unlikely to see even their family doctor in their final hours, robbed of their dignity and fed through a tube after a long series of excessive and hopeless medical interventions. This is the starting point of Seamus O'Mahoney's thoughtful, moving and unforgettable book on the western way of death. Dying has never been more public, with celebrities writing detailed memoirs of their illness, but in private we have done our best to banish all thought of dying and made a good death increasingly difficult to achieve.

William Osler

William Osler PDF Author: Michael Bliss
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 9780802085412
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 626

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Book Description
In his time the most famous physician in the world, Canadian-born William Osler (1849-1919) is still the best-known figure in the history of medicine. This new, definitive biography by Michael Bliss is the first full-scale life of Osler to appear since 1925. An award-winning medical historian, Bliss draws on many untapped sources to recreate Osler's life and medical times for a new generation of readers. Born at Bond Head, north of Toronto, Osler rose from obscurity to become the greatest medical teacher and writer in three countries. At Canada's McGill University, America's Johns Hopkins University, and finally as regius professor at Oxford, Osler was idolized by two generations of medical students and practitioners, for whom he came to personify the ideal doctor. His quest was to bring high standards and scientific methods into general practice in the medical world and to give teaching hospitals a solid place in the education of doctors. The publication of his book, The Principles and Practice of Medicine (1892), established him as the authority of modern medicine, a position he held well into the new century. Osler was revered as the high priest of the advent of twentieth-century medicine. In this fine biography, Michael Bliss animates the epic quality of Osler's life - not only in telling his personal story, but in setting that story against the dramatic backdrop of the coming of modern medicine. Winner of the Jason A. Hannah Medal, awarded by the Royal Society of Canada and the Hannah Institute for the History of Medicine

Killing Times

Killing Times PDF Author: David Wills
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 082328350X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
Killing Times begins with the deceptively simple observation—made by Jacques Derrida in his seminars on the topic—that the death penalty mechanically interrupts mortal time by preempting the typical mortal experience of not knowing at what precise moment we will die. Through a broader examination of what constitutes mortal temporality, David Wills proposes that the so-called machinery of death summoned by the death penalty works by exploiting, or perverting, the machinery of time that is already attached to human existence. Time, Wills argues, functions for us in general as a prosthetic technology, but the application of the death penalty represents a new level of prosthetic intervention into what constitutes the human. Killing Times traces the logic of the death penalty across a range of sites. Starting with the legal cases whereby American courts have struggled to articulate what methods of execution constitute “cruel and unusual punishment,” Wills goes on to show the ways that technologies of death have themselves evolved in conjunction with ideas of cruelty and instantaneity, from the development of the guillotine and the trap door for hanging, through the firing squad and the electric chair, through today’s controversies surrounding lethal injection. Responding to the legal system’s repeated recourse to storytelling—prosecutors’ and politicians’ endless recounting of the horrors of crimes—Wills gives a careful eye to the narrative, even fictive spaces that surround crime and punishment. Many of the controversies surrounding capital punishment, Wills argues, revolve around the complex temporality of the death penalty: how its instant works in conjunction with forms of suspension, or extension of time; how its seeming correlation between egregious crime and painless execution is complicated by a number of different discourses. By pinpointing the temporal technology that marks the death penalty, Wills is able to show capital punishment’s expansive reach, tracing the ways it has come to govern not only executions within the judicial system, but also the opposed but linked categories of the suicide bombing and drone warfare. In discussing the temporal technology of death, Wills elaborates the workings both of the terrorist who produces a simultaneity of crime and “punishment” that bypasses judicial process, and of the security state, in whose remote-control killings the time-space coordinates of “justice” are compressed and at the same time disappear into the black hole of secrecy. Grounded in a deep ethical and political commitment to death penalty abolition, Wills’s engaging and powerfully argued book pushes the question of capital punishment beyond the confines of legal argument to show how the technology of capital punishment defines and appropriates the instant of death and reconfigures the whole of human mortality.

A Good Death

A Good Death PDF Author: Sandra Martin
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 1443435988
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Having a good death is our final human right, argues Sandra Martin in this updated and expanded version of her bestselling and award-winning social history of the right to die movement in Canada and around the world. Winner of the BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction, finalist for both the Donner Prize in Public Policy and the Dafoe Prize for History, A Good Death has a new chapter on Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying Law. The law allows mentally competent adults, who are suffering grievously from incurable conditions, to ask for a doctor’s help in ending their lives. Does the law go far enough? No, says Martin. She delivers compelling stories about the patients the law ignores: people with life-crushing diseases who are condemned to suffer because their natural deaths are not reasonably foreseeable. With a clear analytical eye, she exposes the law’s shortcomings and outlines constitutional challenges, including the presumed right of publicly-funded faith-based institutions to deny suffering patients a legal medical service. Martin argues that Canada can set an example for the world if it can strike a balance between compassion for the suffering and protection of the vulnerable, between individual choice and social responsibility. A Good Death asks the tough question none of us can avoid: How do you want to die? The answer will change your life—and your death. “[An] excellent new book. . . .The timeliness is hard to overstate.” —The Globe and Mail “What truly distinguishes this book is the reportage on individuals and families who have fought to arrange for a better death. . . . These first-hand experiences are the beating heart of a timely and powerful examination.” —2017 BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction Jury Citation