ABSTRACT
Palliative care is an interdisciplinary approach to care for terminally ill and dying people that aims at improving their quality of life by treating pain as well as psychological, social, and spiritual needs. Even though palliative care in Europe is often dated back to the so-called modern hospice movement, the medical care for the terminally ill and dying—as opposed to a solely religious care by clergy—has its roots in the early modern age. According to the World Health Organization’s definition, palliative care features a certain set of ideologies: palliative care claims to provide holistic care, exhibits distinct ideals of a good death, and objects to assisted dying. Given that these ideologies allow for religious rationalization, palliative care constitutes a medical field in which medical and religious rationales may co-occur. Anthroposophic palliative care represents an ideal case study to show how religious beliefs enter the medical field, in this case by rationalizing core palliative care ideologies with anthroposophic medical conceptions.
