ABSTRACT
Medicine occupies a central position in our lives today. We expect to be diagnosed correctly and to receive the latest treatment based on extensive scientific research. The media enthusiastically recount breakthroughs in our understanding of disease, or complex operations that can restore our quality of life. Alongside this progress psychologists have noted our increasing bewilderment and even anger in the face of death. Wonder at what medicine can achieve is disturbed by what it cannot. It is difficult then to envisage a world where medicine could offer only some comfort and where death, especially among the very young, was always lurking as a very real threat. Yet many historians concede that palliative care by Galen would have been far preferable to anything that was to be available until the closing years of the nineteenth century.
