THE DYING PROCESS
Patients’ Experiences of Palliative Care
Julia Lawton
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Routledge, 2000
229pp
ISBN 0-415-22679-1
RRP £18, $US 29
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This book is meant to be about patients’ experiences of palliative care. But it is really about Julia Lawton’s (educational background
and training not disclosed) interpretation and analysis of those experiences. And I found some of them pretty difficult to follow.
In her fieldwork in a hospice, she discovered that dying patients frequently undergo progressive physical deterioration leading to
increasing dependency. To the point, she says, that there is “loss of self”.
Now if this is the case, she argues, then palliative care workers who talk about “living well until you die” are not telling the
truth. And those of us who talk about “dignified deaths” are hypocrites. Well, I mean, how can you talk about dignity when, having relieved a patient of terrible pain, they become more despondent
about their incontinence? Are hospices, she asks, just a place to hide this “dirty dying”.
Described as a “subtle ethnographic study” by the publisher, I found it both convoluted and confronting.
Roger Woodruff
Director of Palliative Care, Austin Health, Melbourne, Australia
(May 2004)
Table of Contents
1. Introduction 1
2. Day Care: A safe retreat 39
3. ‘Body-subject’ to ‘body-object’: Hospice care and the dying patient 81
4. Inpatient Hospice Care: The sequestration of the unbounded body and “dirty dying” 122
5. Invisible suffering: The social death 148
Final reflections 171
