The relentless therapeutic imperative.

many helpful comments; and the Thai teachers and students who received us with such great friendliness. We also thank Ronald Frankenberg for supervision of AW's fieldwork and Kimberly Rosegger for help with the manuscript. Contributors and sources: Both authors have a German medical background and currently teach anatomy to medical students. This paper arose from AW's MSc dissertation in medical anthropology (Brunel University), during which he conducted two months of anthropological fieldwork (participant observation in the dissecting room and informal interviews with faculty members and students) in Phitsanulok. FHG spent over three years working as an anatomist in Thailand. AW is the guarantor. Quidne mortui vivos docent? The evolving purpose of human dissection in medical education. Decisions about care near the end of life are always difficult, even more so when a relative has a progressive neurological illness Sweet rose, whose hue angry and brave Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye, Thy root is ever in its grave, And thou must die. From Virtue by George Herbert This is a story about the experience of making decisions about when to choose interventions near the end of life. It is about the difficulty of making those decisions for a close relative. It is not a story about good and bad doctors, though their recognition of the difficulties can make a difference. And it is about a special difficulty faced by people with a long term progressive neurological illness and their close relatives. As relatives, we have been caring for people with illnesses whose potentially lethal complications can be managed medically so that the person stays alive with ever increasing disability. We fear that dying will be drawn out interminably, past our capacity to care. Ideas of autonomous decision making by the ill person are not sufficiently helpful—nor is there just one choice to make about whether to accept interventions, but many decisions, each one closely related to particular circumstances. We would be helped by doctors and nurses who were prepared to advise when further treatment might be too burdensome. When the consultant recommended the PEG (percuta-neous endoscopic gastrostomy) I was appalled, and in my shock wanted to tell him that he could have my husband too, if he liked, as his husband, well maybe as his brother. Speaking from among his circle of junior doctors and nurses around my husband's bed, the consultant had responded to my observation that, as …