ABSTRACT
A sociological perspective draws attention to the processes in the social structure that foster anxiety in particular kinds of role-relations and a sociological perspective also draws attention to the social consequences of anxiety for the workings of social structures. Technical advances and discoveries in medicine have held such promise that society has endowed physicians with the privilege and the duty to eradicate disease. Physicians' dispositions and behaviors and institutional practices serve to protect them from being identified with the failure to fulfill their role. The sanctity of life ethic has helped to push physicians, nurses, and other medical professionals into a pugilistic tendency to combat death at any cost, and to define its occurrence as a personal and professional defeat. The sources of physicians' anxiety have moral overtones because they are connected to a possible failure to fulfill their social role, which, consequently, suggests a possible delict or culpability on the part of the physician and of the profession.
