The Inevitable Hour PDF

Rating: Author: Emily K. Abel ISBN : Product Detai New from Format: PDF

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At the turn of the twentieth century, medicine’s imperative to cure disease increasingly took priority over the demand to relieve pain and suffering at the end of life. Filled with heartbreaking stories, The Inevitable Hour demonstrates that professional attention and resources gradually were diverted from dying patients.

Emily K. Abel challenges three myths about health care and dying in America. First, that medicine has always sought authority over death and dying; second, that medicine superseded the role of families and spirituality at the end of life; and finally, that only with the advent of the high-tech hospital did an institutional death become dehumanized. Abel shows that hospitals resisted accepting dying patients and often worked hard to move them elsewhere. Poor, terminally ill patients, for example, were shipped from Bellevue Hospital in open boats across the East River to Blackwell’s Island, where they died in hovels, mostly without medical care. Some terminal patients were not forced to leave, yet long before the advent of feeding tubes and respirators, dying in a hospital was a profoundly dehumanizing experience.

With technological advances, passage of the Social Security Act, and enactment of Medicare and Medicaid, almshouses slowly disappeared and conditions for dying patients improved—though, as Abel argues, the prejudices and approaches of the past are still with us. The problems that plagued nineteenth-century almshouses can be found in many nursing homes today, where residents often receive substandard treatment. A frank portrayal of the medical care of dying people past and present, The Inevitable Hour helps to explain why a movement to restore dignity to the dying arose in the early 1970s and why its goals have been so difficult to achieve.

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• Product Details
• Table of Contents
• Reviews

• File Size: 660 KB
• Print Length: 240 pages
• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press; 1 edition (March 13, 2013)
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
• Language: English
• ASIN: B00BURPHK0
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• X-Ray:
  Not Enabled
• Lending: Not Enabled
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #657,662 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

The Inevitable Hour PDF

Emily Abel dives in deep into the history of how dying patients were cared for in the late 1800s and into the mid 1900s. She appears to have researched this very thoroughly; the endnotes take up as much space as a chapter. There are small anecdotes throughout the book, but at the end she focuses in on two prominent historical characters, which seemed like an odd twist. When I first got it, I thought that it looked a bit too much like a textbook and was afraid that it would be hard reading, but it was actually quite easy to read and held my attention so that it only took a few days for me to get through it. For me, the most interesting part (though maybe not the author's main intent) was to see how so many things that I'm frustrated about our current system really go back to the very beginning. (I'm an ICU nurse in a metropolitan hospital, so I could relate to a lot of the stories).

By JessB

Very good book and will be very useful in my studies. I think that a I made a good choice.

By Flavia RLR Teixeira