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The Inevitable Hour - A History of Caring for Dying Patients in America (Paperback)
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The Inevitable Hour - A History of Caring for Dying Patients in America (Paperback)
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At the turn of the twentieth century, medicine's imperative to cure
disease increasingly took priority over the demand to relieve pain
and suffering at the end of life. Filled with heartbreaking
stories, The Inevitable Hour demonstrates that professional
attention and resources gradually were diverted from dying
patients. Emily K. Abel challenges three myths about health care
and dying in America. First, that medicine has always sought
authority over death and dying; second, that medicine superseded
the role of families and spirituality at the end of life; and
finally, that only with the advent of the high-tech hospital did an
institutional death become dehumanized. Abel shows that hospitals
resisted accepting dying patients and often worked hard to move
them elsewhere. Poor, terminally ill patients, for example, were
shipped from Bellevue Hospital in open boats across the East River
to Blackwell's Island, where they died in hovels, mostly without
medical care. Some terminal patients were not forced to leave, yet
long before the advent of feeding tubes and respirators, dying in a
hospital was a profoundly dehumanizing experience. With
technological advances, passage of the Social Security Act, and
enactment of Medicare and Medicaid, almshouses slowly disappeared
and conditions for dying patients improved-though, as Abel argues,
the prejudices and approaches of the past are still with us. The
problems that plagued nineteenth-century almshouses can be found in
many nursing homes today, where residents often receive substandard
treatment. A frank portrayal of the medical care of dying people
past and present, The Inevitable Hour helps to explain why a
movement to restore dignity to the dying arose in the early 1970s
and why its goals have been so difficult to achieve.
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