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The View from Medicine's Front Line
by Seamus O'Mahony
Dying has become medicalized and sanitized, but doctors cannot prescribe a "good death." The Way We Die Now asks us to consider how we have gotten to this age of spiritual poverty and argues that giving up our fantasies of control over death can help restore its significance.
We have lost the ability to deal with death.
Most of the dying spend their last days in general hospitals and nursing homes, in the care of strangers. They may not even know they are dying, victims of the kindly lie that there is still hope. They are often robbed of their dignity after a long series of excessive and hopeless medical interventions.
This is the starting point of Seamus O'Mahony's book on the western way of death. Dying has never been more exposed, with public figures writing memoirs of their illness, but in private we have done our best to banish all thought of death.
"Starred Review. O'Mahony's clear-eyed analysis is important, poignant, and immensely humane." - Publisher's Weekly
"A valuable and thoughtful treatment that effectively draws on O'Mahony's professional insights as well as his Irish Catholic upbringing to provide glimpses into Western society's relationship with mortality." - Library Journal
"A searingly honest, humane and challenging book to prompt a wider conversation about death and dying." - The Guardian (UK)
This information about The Way We Die Now was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Dr. Seamus O'Mahony is a Consultant Gastroenterologist at Cork University Hospital. He is associate editor for medical humanities of the Journal of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh and is a regular contributor to the Dublin Review of Books. He is the author of The Way We Die Now.
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