Confronting Death Values, Institutions, and Human Mortality [Paperback]

In this masterfully written text, Moller powerfully critiques how modern technology and bureaucracy, along with professionalization, have come to dehumanize the experience of death for both the dying and their survivors. Beginning with an historical overview of traditional patterns of death and dying, Moller examines the technological advances of the medical profession and the effects, both social and individual, that modern medicine has had on our perception of death, including pain and suffering, the expanding gap between clinical and spiritual death, and how our traditional social apparatuses help us to respond to death and dying. Chapters on funerals, grief, suicide, the death of children, the holocaust, and a critique of therapeutic models illustrate how doctors have come to control the process of dying, how professional funeral directors dominate funerals, and how professional therapists channel the grief of survivors. Invaluable for psychology, nursing, and religion courses in death and dying, this text offers a penetrating synthesis of the complex personal and social issues surrounding our mortality.

1 DYING AND HISTORICAL CONTEXT.
Traditional Patterns of Death and Dying
2 THE MODERN ORGANIZATION OF DEATH.
The Medicalization of Dying, The Caretaker's Role, Staff Patients and Patterns of Dying
3 THE DYING PATIENT: A CREATION OF THE MODERN ORGANIZATION OF DEATH.
American Folk-hero of Death and Dying and Bricklayer of Stages for the Dying Patient, Trajectories of Dying, Suffering in the face of Dying,Elizabeth Kubler-Ross
4 FUNERALS AS SOCIAL FACTS.
The Funeral as a Social Rite
5 GRIEF AND INDIVIDUALISM: THE DECLINE OF RITUAL AND THE EMERGENCE OF THE THERAPEUTIC MODEL.
Grief as Social Concept, Grief as a Disease, Widowhood
6 ON DYING DEATH AND CHILDREN.
Children's Perceptions of Death, Parental Bereavement
7 THE DEATH OF HUMANS BY HUMANS.
Part One: Suicide
8 THE DEATH OF HUMANS BY HUMANS.
Part 2: Thlƒ