ABSTRACT
The rise of modern industrialized civilization profoundly transformed the experience of dying for most people in Europe and the West. In the pre-modern world, death was primarily a family event, whether or not attended by clerics or doctors. In medieval Europe, the dominant Christian world view embedded death, dying, and the care of the dead within layers of ritual.1 Modernity changed all that. Scientific progress weakened religious belief, which led to the loss of the comfort provided by ritual behavior. The place of dying shifted from the home to the hospital, from a familial to a medical environment. More and more people died in a setting defined by the model of the clinic, rather than the family or the church. Death was hidden away, seldom witnessed or even discussed. As the French scholar Philippe Ariès put it, the modern West became “a society where death has lost the prominent place which custom had granted it over the millennia, a society where the interdiction of death paralyzes and inhibits the reactions of the medical staff and family involved.”2
