Rituals in Death and Dying: Modern Medical Technologies Enter the Fray

Rituals in Death and Dying: Modern Medical Technologies Enter the Fray

In the absence of immortality, the human species has over the millennia developed rites and rituals to help in the passing of life to honor the person who is dying or has died or in some way demonstrate their "courage" and perseverance as well as duty even in the face of almost certain death. The centuries-old traditions of the gathering of loved ones, the chanting of prayers, the ritual religi...

Platelets Enter the Fray

A series of reports in 2007 established that single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the 9p21.3 locus are associated with coronary heart disease (CHD), both in patients with acute myocardial infarction and chronic atherosclerosis.1–4 Subsequently, many additional studies used a candidate locus approach to replicate the 9p21.3-CHD association. Intriguingly, other phenotypes have also been foun...

Educating medical students about death and dying.

Doctors in every branch of medicine must from time to time deal with patients who are dying or who have life threatening illnesses. Many young doctors avoid facing their own feelings about death, finding them stressful.1 When patients die we are perhaps reminded of the certainty of our own deaths. In 1915 Freud2 wrote: 'Our own death is indeed unimaginable ... at bottom no-one believes in his o...

Cardiothoracic surgery: a dying specialty in the modern medical era.

the tragedy of modern man in arthur millers world

what miller wants is a theatre of heightened consciousness. he speaks of two passions in a man, the passion to "feel" and the passion "know". he belives that we can have more of the latter. he says: drama is akin to the other inventions of man in that it ought to help us know more and not merely to spend our feelings. the writing of the crucible shows us that he is trying to give more heightene...