Repository | Book | Chapter

At risk of overstatement a physician and historian of medicine, Chester R. Burns, the past President of the Society for Health and Human Values, remarked that "Contemporary man is transforming death from a taboo to an obscenity" ([5], p. 3). As he rightly observes, there are books, articles, symposia, editorials, societies, panel discussions, political caucuses expressing ideologies and hospices. Distinguishing as we should the phenomenon of death from the concept and language in which the concept reveals itself, it is the latter which is in danger of becoming indecent, impure, and even obscene. The phenomenon of death was never taboo. However, only the explicit bringing to consciousness of the latent affect associated with the phenomenon was forbidden. Indeed, in many quarters the topic is still very much taboo, in spite of the fact that many of us move in circles where the phenomenon of death is "discussed." We should not, after all, assume that our particular social nexus is typical. In truth it is more correct to say that authentic and open talk about death is still taboo and, especially in academic circles, at times even obscene. The reality, in short, is expressed by the conjunctive.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-009-9783-7_6

Full citation: