The Dying Patient

"Recommended for the provocative questions it raises concerning the effect on the patient of the structure of medical care, concerning the important decisions regarding policy facing the medical profession, the hospital administrator, and the public, and for the discussions of legal and economic dimensions which are frequently forgotten by personnel working directly with the patient.Edmund C. Payne, Psychiatry in Medicine The fourteen original articles in The Dying Patient examine the problems of dying and medical conduct from the perspectives of sociology, economics, medicine, and the law.

Orville G. Brim, Jr. is president of the Foundation for Child Development and former president of the Russell Sage Foundation. Howard E. Freeman is director of the Institute for Social Science Research and professor of sociology at the University of California in Los Angeles. Sol Levine is university professor of sociology and community medicine at Boston University, and Norman Scotch is professor and chairman of the Department of Socio-Medical Services and Community Medicine at Boston University's School of Medicine.

CONTRIBUTORS, PREFACE, INTRODUCTION: New Dimensions of Dying, 1. When, Why, and Where People Die, 2. What People Think About Death, 3. Cultural Beliefs on Life and Death, 4. The Prognosis of Death, 5. Physicians' Behavior Toward the Dying Patient, 6. Innovations and Heroic Acts in Prolonging Life, 7. Patterns of Dying, 8. The Dying Patient's Point of View, 9. Consequences of Death for Physicians, Nurses, and Hospitals, 10. Dying in a Public Hospital, 11. Dying as an Emerging Social Problem, 12. Control of Medical Conduct, 13. Legal and Policy Issues in the Allocation of Death, 14. Economic and Social Costs of Death, CONCLUSION: Dying and Its Dilemmas as a Field of Research, Death and Dying, a Briefly Annotated Bibliography, INDEX