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Home 2310


PALLIATIVE CARE: CULTURAL AND ETHICAL SIGNIFICANCE

byCarlo Casalone, SJ
September 18, 2023
in 2310, COVID-19, Economics, Edition, Full Text Article, Medicine, Mission,
Science, Spirituality, Subscriber Only Articles, SYNOD 2021-24: ADVANCING
VATICAN II, Trending Article
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Many of the extraordinary successes of Western medicine are the result of
applying to the clinical field wisdom and technology from the empirical
sciences. These include diagnostic tools such as magnetic resonance imaging,
based on the latest findings in elementary particle physics, as well as robots
for surgery and rehabilitation, employing sophisticated artificial intelligence
devices.


LIMIT AND FINITENESS: FROM OVERCOMING TO CONCEALMENT

Biomedicine is clearly indebted to the scientific enterprise. The continuous
effort to expand the limits of knowledge and explore the opportunities to
intervene in the care of the body has enabled us to defeat diseases that were
once incurable, as we continue to herald new successes. This has induced a sense
that limits are not only surmountable but they can also be concealed and perhaps
even suppressed.

It is therefore not surprising that the same attitude is taken toward death,
that radical limit to life. Sociologists and anthropologists warn us that in our
society death is often concealed and denied. It is banished from everyday social
life and relegated to hospital settings where patients become part of a medical
system managed by specialized professionals; it tends to be excluded from social
interaction; it does not lend itself to shared ways of processing, so that
mourning becomes a private matter. These are different ways of removing death
from our attention and as an event that affects us.

The pandemic and the multiplication of wars has suddenly made death more
visible. But the fundamental situation has not changed. Mass media, including
cinema, by translating this trend into statistics and emphasizing its
sensational features, has tended to make it anonymous and distant.

We fail to process socially and culturally the various forms death takes: the
planetary spread of the Covid virus, the atrociously destructive capacity of
weapons, the mass deaths caused by natural disasters. What do they mean in
personal and community life? Death is represented is such a way that the viewer
is left at a distance, witnessing events that concern others.[1] At best it
stirs emotions, but seldom allows space for adequate mourning. Those who “are
not mourned are neither living nor dead, but ghostly, and wander in the limbo of
the collective conscience.”[2] Thus a kind of tension appears between a death
that bursts upon us insistently and with excessive force but lacking inner
intelligibility, and “an almost invisible death experience, personal and deeply
moving because it is real, and has a considerable psychological impact.”[3]


REMOVAL AS A SYMPTOM

Faced with this mismatch between the measurable dimensions of the phenomenon and
the apparent avoidance of the experience, the question arises whether such
removal or avoidance is not a symptom of unease when faced with representations
of dying perceived as inadequate.[4] In fact, even at the urging of the natural
sciences, death is increasingly regarded as a simple biological fact, which
interrupts the life of the organism, ending in nothingness. Today, death as
annihilation has lost all its ability to contribute to the meaning of life. But
the consequences of this perspective of complete final annihilation, which would
render all commitment to others and to goodness meaningless, do not seem to be
unambiguously and widely embraced with conviction, even by those who endorse its
premise.

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