ABSTRACT
The Egyptian Book of the Dead offers advice to individuals approaching death about what they could expect after death while, in the Middle Ages, the Ars Moriendi, offers counsel to individuals on ways to die a good death. Sociologists Glaser and Strauss completed two books that would contribute some enduring concepts to the study of the dying process. Kubler-Ross posited that dying persons went through a series of five stages such as denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Avery Weisman's work on denial suggests another difficulty, denial and acceptance are far more complicated than Ross perceived. E. M. Pattison wrote of the process of illness in his concept of the living-dying interval, the time between the diagnosis of a life-limiting illness and death. The 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s were a formative time for the study of dying. It was in this period that Cicely Saunders founded St. Christopher's Hospice, often credited as the first hospice, in the London area.
