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The Philosophy of Palliative Care: Critique and Reconstruction

Edited by Fiona Randall, R S Downie. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, £29.95 (paperback), pp 256. ISBN 0198567367

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Relief from suffering has been the primary aim of doctors for centuries, yet one of the consequences of the growth and spread of the powerful technologies that enable doctors to intervene in disease has been a greater uncertainty about the boundaries of dying. This is not only a professional dilemma. Anyone with access to television, newspapers and other media will have a dramatised mental picture of medical possibilities that can, and certainly do, result in unrealistic expectations of what can be reasonably achieved in the treatment of severe disease, and even terminal illness.

This, and other factors, seem to have led us as a society down a path of increasing disappointment, medical consumerism and politicisation of healthcare, despite the objective evidence of steadily improving health standards through the 20th century. In this . . . [Full text of this article]