ABSTRACT
This book is about the revival of death as a fit topic of conversation in home, hospital and society at large. My term ‘revival’ deliberately suggests something akin to a religious revival. But religious revivals rarely last long, their fire sooner or later burning itself out. A useful framework for analysing this has been provided by the sociologist Max Weber, in his concept of the routinisation of charisma (Bendix 1966). Weber’s framework has been brilliantly applied to the hospice movement by James and Field (1992) in an argument which directly addresses the question of whether hospices and similar institutions can not only listen to patients but keep on listening. Much of this chapter will be spent summarising James and Field’s argument.
