Never Say Die: CPR in Hospital Space

Abstract

Hospitals and all the high-tech equipment they contain, at least in western societies, are a taken-for-granted part of the geographical and cultural landscape in the lives of the majority of people, and despite the ever-increasing commitment to facilitating ‘a good death’ in the home situation,¹ it is still the place where most people die.

In western societies biomedicine has occupied a niche in modern life in which its hegemony regarding healing seems to be taken for granted. This hegemony is based on its increasingly high-tech assisted and evidence-based efficacy, on the dominant ‘naturalist’ and ‘positivist’ assumptions that bring to biomedicine the air of success associated with the natural sciences, and on the spirit of the Enlightenment that frames the historical development of scientific medicine.

(Lázár and Jonannenessen, 2006: 189)