Prelude to Hospice

Florence Wald, Dying People, and Their Families
Erscheinungsjahr 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8135-9391-3
Verlag: Univ of Chicago Behalf of Rutgers Univ Press

Buch, Englisch, 125 Seiten, Hardback, Format (B × H): 214 mm x 139 mm, Gewicht: 286 g

Reihe: Critical Issues in Health and Medicine

Hospices have played a critical role in transforming ideas about death and dying. Viewing death as a natural event, hospices seek to enable people approaching mortality to live as fully and painlessly as possible. Award-winning medical historian Emily K. Abel provides insight into several important issues surrounding the growth of hospice care. Using a unique set of records, Prelude to Hospice expands our understanding of the history of U.S. hospices. Compiled largely by Florence Wald, the founder of the first U.S. hospice, the records provide a detailed account of her experiences studying and caring for dying people and their families in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Although Wald never published a report of her findings, she often presented her material informally. Like many others seeking to found new institutions, she believed she could garner support only by demonstrating that her facility would be superior in every respect to what currently existed. As a result, she generated inflated expectations about what a hospice could accomplish. Wald's records enable us to glimpse the complexities of the work of tending to dying people.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Abel, Emily K

Inhaltsverzeichnis

- Introduction
- 1 Setting the Stage
- 2 Doctor and Nurse
- 3 Caring across Cultures
- 4 Hope, Blame, and Acceptance
- 5 Making Sense of the Findings
- Conclusion

Über Autor(innen)

Emily K. Abel is professor emerita of public health at the University of California, Los Angeles's Fielding School of Public Health. She is the author of several books, including Tuberculosis and the Politics of Exclusion: A History of Public Health and Migration to Los Angeles (Rutgers University Press), which won the Viseltear Prize of the Medical Section of the American Public Health Association for an Outstanding Book in the History of Public Health.