Death Is That Man Taking Names: Intersections of American Medicine, Law, and Culture

Foreword

FOREWORD The Milbank Memorial Fund is an endowed national foundation that engages in nonpartisan analysis, study, research, and communication on significant issues in health policy. The Fund makes available the results of its work in meetings with decision-makers, reports, articles, and books. This is the seventh of the series of California/Milbank Books on Health and the Public. The publishing partnership between the Fund and the Press seeks to encourage the synthesis and communication of findings from research that could contribute to more effective health policy. Robert Burt contributes to more effective policy for the care of persons who are near death by arraying evidence that in American society “ambivalence about death can be denied” but “it cannot reliably be suppressed .” The results of developing and implementing policy to “bring public visibility and rationality to death-dispensing decisions” have included “new guises for public concealment and implicit acceptance of irrational impulses.” Burt challenges policymakers to acknowledge persistent ambivalence about the acceptability of death. He argues that law and clinical policy should insist that persons making decisions that bear on death—including dying persons themselves—should recognize and “amplify” this unavoidable ambivalence. To do otherwise, he argues with elegance and eloquence, is to risk “renewed (and perhaps even more virulent) abuses of dying people.” Daniel M. Fox, President Samuel L. Milbank, Chairman ix This page intentionally left blank ...