The Troubled Dream of Life: In Search of a Peaceful Death

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Georgetown University Press, 12 jun 2000 - 256 páginas

Drawing on his own experience, and on literature, philosophy, and medicine, Daniel Callahan offers great insight into how to deal with the rewards of modern medicine without upsetting our perception of death. He examines how we view death and the care of the critically ill or dying, and he suggests ways of understanding death that can lead to a peaceful acceptance. Callahan's thoughtful perspective notably enhances the legal and moral discussions about end-of-life issues.

Originally published in 1993 by Simon and Schuster.

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THE FIRST ILLUSION MASTERING OUR MEDICAL CHOICES
23
STRIPPING DEATH BARE THE RECOVERY OF NATURE
57
THE LAST ILLUSION REGULATING EUTHANASIA
91
LIVING WITH THE MORTAL SELF
120
NATURE DEATH AND MEANING SHAPING OUR
156
PURSUING A PEACEFUL DEATH
187
WATCHING AND WAITING
220
NOTES
232
INDEX
247
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Página 156 - And you, my father, there on the sad height, Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray. Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Página 103 - No right is held more sacred, or is more carefully guarded, by the common law, than the right of every individual to the possession and control of his own person, free from all restraint or interference of others, unless by clear and unquestionable authority of law.
Página 128 - We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.
Página 30 - Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting, still the evil background is really there to be thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet.
Página 106 - The principle of freedom cannot require that he should be free not to be free. It is not freedom to be allowed to alienate his freedom.
Página 76 - ... burden. However, the point is the same in these cases: The bare difference between killing and letting die does not, in itself, make a moral difference. If a doctor lets a patient die, for humane reasons, he is in the same moral position as if he had given the patient a lethal injection for humane reasons.
Página 107 - It is said that a competent adult person ought to have a right to euthanasia for the relief of suffering. But why must the person be suffering? Does not that stipulation already compromise the right of self-determination? How can self-determination have any limits? Why are not the person's desires or motives, whatever they be, sufficient?
Página 233 - An aged man is but a paltry thing, A tattered coat upon a stick, unless Soul clap its hands and sing...

Sobre el autor (2000)

The co-founder and former president of the Hastings Center, Daniel Callahan is currently the director of international programs there and author of Setting Limits: Medical Goals in an Aging Society, and What Kind of Life? The Limits of Medical Progress (Georgetown University Press).

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