Death Is That Man Taking Names: Intersections of American Medicine, Law, and Culture / Edition 1

by Robert A. Burt

Overview

The American culture of death changed radically in the 1970s. For terminal illnesses, hidden decisions by physicians were rejected in favor of rational self-control by patients asserting their "right to die"—initially by refusing medical treatment and more recently by physician-assisted suicide. This new claim rested on two seemingly irrefutable propositions: first, that death can be a positive good for individuals whose suffering has become intolerable; and second, that death is an inevitable and therefore morally neutral biological event. Death Is That Man Taking Names suggests, however, that a contrary attitude persists in our culture—that death is inherently evil, not just in practical but also in moral terms. The new ethos of rational self-control cannot refute but can only unsuccessfully try to suppress this contrary attitude. The inevitable failure of this suppressive effort provokes ambivalence and clouds rational judgment in many people's minds and paradoxically leads to inflictions of terrible suffering on terminally ill people.

Judicial reforms in the 1970s of abortion and capital punishment were driven by similarly high valuations of rationality and public decision-making—rejecting physician control over abortion in favor of individual self-control by pregnant women and subjecting unsupervised jury decisions for capital punishment to supposed rationally guided supervision by judges. These reforms also attempt to suppress persistently ambivalent attitudes toward death, and are therefore prone to inflicting unjustified suffering on pregnant women and death-sentenced prisoners.

In this profound and subtle account of psychological and social forces underlying American cultural attitudes toward death, Robert A. Burt maintains that unacknowledged ambivalence is likely to undermine the beneficent goals of post-1970s reforms and harm the very people these changes were intended to help.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520243248
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	09/06/2004
Series:	California/Milbank Books on Health and the Public , #7
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	232
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Robert A. Burt is Alexander M. Bickel Professor of Law at Yale University. He is the author of The Constitution in Conflict (1992), Two Jewish Justices: Outcasts in the Promised Land (California, 1981), and Taking Care of Strangers: The Rule of Law in Doctor-Patient Relations (1979).

Table of Contents

I. I Fear No Evil: Pursuing the Good Death
II. I Walk through Shadows: Hidden Death
III. In the Presence of My Enemies: Death at War
IV. Lead Me in Paths of Righteousness: Judges and Death
V. They Comfort Me: Doctors and Death
VI. He Makes Me Lie Down: Choosing Death
VII. Surely Goodness and Mercy Shall Follow: The Death Penalty
VIII. All the Days of My Life

Notes

Editorial Reviews

This book is enormously important, beautifully reasoned and written with crystal clarity by an author of wide scholarly experience, brilliant insights and extraordinary erudition. It is the first book length study I've seen that reasons from the individual psychology of all stakeholders. It ultimately provides the only truly revealing way to understand the personal and civic conundrums surrounding dying, which have always been characterized by irrational thinking, inconsistencies of behavior and paradoxes of personal viewpoints.

Sherwin Nuland

Once you acknowledge the profound and inescapable ambivalence that shapes our attitudes toward death, what can we learn about our death-dealing policies and practices, from end-of-life care and assisted suicide to the death penalty? Robert Burt's Death is That Man Taking Names provides extraordinary insights in eloquent and elegant prose. All thoughtful people who are seriously interested in the deeper roots and broader implications of our policies concerning death should read this remarkably original and provocative book.

Thomas H. Murray

An enormously important book, filled with original insights that bear on the often convoluted public discourse surrounding such issues as physician-assisted suicide, end-of-life care, abortion, and the death penalty, as well as the private sorrow and anguish of families and patients.

Washington Montly