ABSTRACT
The reality of modern life – or rather death – is that increasingly medicine and healthcare professionals are involved. People no longer die at home, surrounded by their family. Very often, they die in hospital, surrounded by clinicians armed with an extraordinary array of techniques and technologies to help prolong life. Kass paints a gripping – if depressing – picture of the modern death as a process during which the patient is ‘. . . kept company by cardiac pacemakers and defibrillators, respirators, aspirators, oxygenators, catheters, and his intravenous drip. Ties to the community of men are replaced by attachments to an assemblage of machines’.1
