Over the past thirty years, the way Americans experience death has been dramatically altered. The advent of medical technology capable of sustaining life without restoring health has changed where, when, and how we die. In this revelatory study, medical anthropologist Sharon R. Kaufman examines the powerful center of those changes: the hospital, where most Americans die today. She deftly links the experiences of patients and families, the work of hospital staff, and the ramifications of institutional bureaucracy to show the invisible power of the hospital system in shaping death and our...
Over the past thirty years, the way Americans experience death has been dramatically altered. The advent of medical technology capable of sustaining l...
Among the many studies of aging and the aged, there is comparatively little material in which the aged speak for themselves. In this compelling study, Sharon Kaufman encourages just such expression, recording and presenting the voices of a number of old Americans. Her informants tell their life stories and relate their most personal feelings about becoming old. Each story is unique, and yet, presented together, they inevitable weave a clear pattern, one that clashes sharply with much current gerontological thought. With this book, Sharon Kaufman allows us to understand the experience of...
Among the many studies of aging and the aged, there is comparatively little material in which the aged speak for themselves. In this compelling stu...
There are many important questions raised in this book. The fragmentation of medical values, whether a good doctor requires as much knowledge of the person as of the disease, the claims created by a scientific medicine dependent upon the largesse of government grants, the conversion of medicine from cottage industry to entrepreneurial endeavour, all had their beginnings in medicine's Golden Age. Their heirs, today's practitioners, may have mistaken technology for their task, science for their religion, and business for their creed, but if the spirit of the physicians in this book wins out,...
There are many important questions raised in this book. The fragmentation of medical values, whether a good doctor requires as much knowledge of the p...
Most of us want and expect medicine s miracles to extend our lives. In today s aging society, however, the line between life-giving therapies and too much treatment is hard to see it s being obscured by a perfect storm created by the pharmaceutical and biomedical industries, along with insurance companies. In Ordinary Medicine Sharon R. Kaufman investigates what drives that storm s more is better approach to medicine: a nearly invisible chain of social, economic, and bureaucratic forces that has made once-extraordinary treatments seem ordinary, necessary, and desirable. Since 2002...
Most of us want and expect medicine s miracles to extend our lives. In today s aging society, however, the line between life-giving therapies and too ...
