Abstract
This is the first monographic study on the long history of palliative care. The story of the rise of the hospice movement and of modern palliative medicine since the 1960s has often been told. As this book shows, the frequently excruciating suffering that people went through during the last months and weeks of their lives made good palliative care all the more important. It traces the rise of the notion of “palliative” treatment from the late Middle Ages and studies the ways in which physicians dealt with moribund and dying patients, how they viewed and reacted to the ethical problems that arose in this situation and how patients and families experienced terminal medical care.
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Notes
- 1.
For global surveys see David Clark, End-of-life care around the world. Achievements to date and challenges remaining, in: Omega 56 (2007), pp. 101–10; Economist Intelligence Unit, The quality of death. Ranking end-of-life care across the world, 2010 (www.eiu.com/sponsor/lienfoundation/qualityofdeath); Stephen R. Connor and Maria Cecilia Sepulveda Bermedo (eds), Global atlas of palliative care at the end of life, WHO: Worldwide Palliative Care Alliance 2014.
- 2.
See e.g. Susanne Ringskog and Danuta Wassermann, Hastening the end of life. History, research and current Swedish and international debate on the issue of euthanasia, Stockholm: National Center for Suicide Research and Prevention of Mental Ill-Health 2000, p. 86: “The palliative medicine takes its start in London, in 1967”; or Lavi, The modern art of dying (2005), p. 6: “in previous centuries the medical doctor would leave the bedside when it was clear that the patient was hopelessly ill”.
- 3.
Du Boulay, Cicely Saunders (1984); Mary Campion, Ein Hospiz entsteht: von Pionierinnen der Hospizbewegung, Straubing: Attenkofer 1997.
- 4.
Balfour Mount and J. Andrew Billings, What is palliative care? in: Journal of palliative medicine 1 (1998), pp. 73–81, here p. 73.
- 5.
Nicholas Eschenbruch, Ein besseres Sterben? Die Entstehung der modernen Hospizbewegung und ihre historischen Voraussetzungen, in: Praxis 93 (2004), pp. 1265–7; along similar lines: Student, Geschichte (2007).
- 6.
- 7.
See e.g. Olaus Borrichius, Olai Borrichii itinerarium 1660−1665. The journal of the Danish Polyhistor Ole Borch. Ed. by H. D. Schepelern, vol. 1, Copenhagen–London: Reitzels Forlag and Brill 1983, p. 69, on the case of a woman with terrible abdominal pain who, for the 3 weeks before her death, could no longer eat but only scream and moan terribly (“per tres integras hebdom[adas] ante mortem nihil cibi assumpsit, ejulavit tantum et horrendo gemitu vociferata est”)
- 8.
Friedrich Benjamin Osiander, Über die Entwicklungskrankheiten in den Blüthenjahren des weiblichen Geschlechts, part 1, Tübingen: Bey dem Verfasser 1817, pp. 117–8, on the case of a female consumptive patient, around 18 years old, who, in the end, only hoped to die as quickly as possible.
- 9.
Hufeland, Enchiridion medicum (1837), p. 853.
- 10.
Hazel Biggs, Euthanasia, death with dignity and the law, Oxford–Portland: Hart 2001, p. 2.
- 11.
A comparative analysis of non-western cultures, as interesting as it would be, is beyond the scope of this book.
- 12.
Ariès, Western attitudes (1974); idem, L’homme devant la mort; Ariès relied primarily on literary and visual sources, seeking evidence for a “better” way of dying in previous centuries and hardly mentions palliative care. For more recent and nuanced analyses of the cultural history of death and dying see e.g. Mischke, Umgang (1996); Hugger, Meister Tod (2002); Richter, Der phantasierte Tod (2010).
- 13.
Clark, Cradled to the grave? (1999); idem, From margins (2007); see also idem, History, gender and culture in the rise of palliative care, in: Sheila Payne, Jane Seymour and Christine Ingleton (eds), Palliative care nursing. Principles and evidence for practice, Buckingham: Open University Press 2004, pp. 39–54; idem, H. A. M. J. ten Have and Rien Janssens, Palliative care service developments in seven European countries, in: H. A. M. J. ten Have and David Clark (eds), The ethics of palliative care. European perspectives, Buckingham: Open University Press 2002, pp. 34–51; see also Mielke, Sterben und Tod (2006), esp. pp. 113–20; Stoddard Holmes, “The grandest badge” (2003); Buck, Rights of passage (2005); J. Seymour, D. Clark and M. Winslow, Pain and palliative care: the emergence of new specialties, in: Journal of pain & symptom management 29 (2005), pp. 2–13; Hayley and Sachs, A brief history (2005).
- 14.
- 15.
Lewis, Medicine (2007).
- 16.
Carol, Les médecins (2004), esp. pp. 47–127.
- 17.
Jalland, Death (1996), esp. pp. 77–97, chapter on “Death and the Victorian doctors”.
- 18.
Szabo, Incurable (2009).
- 19.
Nolte, Todkrank (2016).
- 20.
Vanderpool, Palliative care (2015).
- 21.
- 22.
See below for biographical information.
- 23.
- 24.
An exception is the recent book by Nolte, Todkrank (2016).
- 25.
Michael Stolberg, Two pioneers of active euthanasia around 1800, in: The Hastings Centre report 38 (2008), n. 6, pp. 19–22.
- 26.
H. Pichlmaier, Palliativmedizin (editorial), in: Zentralblatt für Chirurgie 123 (1998), p. 619; P. D. Wall, 25 volumes of “Pain” (editorial), in: Pain 25 (1986), pp. 1–4; Derek Doyle, Geoffrey Hanks and Nathan I. Cherny, Introduction, in: iidem (eds): Oxford textbook of palliative medicine, 3rd edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2005, pp. 3–8; Derek Doyle, The provision of palliative care, in: ibid., pp. 41–53, here p. 41.
- 27.
Foreest, Observationum (1603–1606).
- 28.
Kümmel, Leichenpredigten (1984).
- 29.
A particularly rich source of this kind are, for the sixteenth century, the extensive notebooks of the Bohemian physician Georg Handsch, with altogether about 4.000 pages, which have survived in the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek in Vienna; cf. Michael Stolberg, Empiricism in sixteenth-century medical practice: The notebooks of Georg Handsch, in: Early science and medicine 18 (2013), pp. 487–516.
- 30.
The experience of dying patients plays a very marginal role e.g. in Lachmund’s and Stollberg’s extensive survey of German patient autobiographies from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries [Lachmund and Stollberg, Patientenwelten (1995)]; although she has unearthed some interesting new sources in an archive of personal diaries Karen Nolte [Nolte, Todkrank (2016)], has ultimately come to the same conclusion.
- 31.
- 32.
Cf. Gleixner, Pietismus (2005), pp. 195–9.
- 33.
- 34.
Cf. Max, Literarische Texte (2008).
- 35.
Max, Liegekur (2013).
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Stolberg, M. (2017). Introduction. In: A History of Palliative Care, 1500-1970. Philosophy and Medicine, vol 123. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54178-5_1
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