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This book is dedicated “To all those whose deaths have led us to meditate.” It reads as an erudite, compassionate and thorough meditation, inviting to join in. In the book are gathered presentations that were held in 1994 at a colloquium on ars moriendi—the art of dying—at Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut. Jointly sponsored by the Program for Humanities in Medicine at Yale and by the Goethe-Institute, Boston, it was a conference in which namely the concerns of physicians and nurses were addressed, in a broad cultural context.
There are two sections—“Witnessing Death: The Medical Battle” and “Framing Death: Cultural and Religious Responses”—of eleven chapters each. In the first section, medical caregivers offer their often anguished thoughts from the perspective as those who are increasingly left to serve alone as society's witness to the passing of lives. In the second section, historians, an anthropologist, theologians, a literary scholar, and pastors speak of the different ways that cultures and religions articulate a frame of meaning for death, first as those religions and cultures locate death within a larger understanding of human life, and then as each has given form to grief, in funerals, in rites of mourning, in graveyards, and in the AIDS Memorial Quilt.
Callahan addresses in his Foreword “the strange way in which a preparation for death is so often transposed from the personal to the legal, from the domain of self-reflection to that of pluralistic ‘choice,’ from the stuff of mystery, awe, and trepidation to that of medical and legal micromanagement.” Physicians rarely see death as a defining part of life. Rather for them it is the enemy, the defeat of all that they do. Death has become prolonged by “life support” systems in the web of “managed care” and “risk management.” As Spiro states: “The conference made clear that we in the caring professions do not need as much to be reacquainted with