Hospice or Hemlock? Searching for Heroic Compassion

Subjects:

• Health/Medicine » Alternative Health & Healing

Reviews:

• In this excellent work on a difficult issue, the author provides an informative overview that challenges readers to examine their own ethics, beliefs, and values as they relate to care giving. The book includes an extensive bibliography and reading list for those who wish to pursue additional information. For anyone considering a career in hospice or palliative care. Essential. General readers; professionals.
  —Choice September 2003
• In a field that is flooded with extremist views, this book provides a sane and moderate balance in addressing the important question of how on chooses to leave life....For those seeking the moral middle ground on this highly charged topic, this book makes an invaluable contribution.
  —Research News and Opportunities in Science and Theology August 2003
• [H]ospice or Hemlock? offers a comprehensive review of the literature and a usual summary of the debate....Putnam achieves her goal of making this well-written and easy-to-read book accessible to a wide audience
  —The New England Journal of Medicine 2003

• Endorsement From From the Foreword by Timothy E. Quill, M.D.
  Professor of Medicine, Psychiatry, and Medical Humanities
  University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry: A 'natural death,' unencumbered by medical choices and interventions, is a rarity in our world. It is in this context that the choice posed by Constance Putnam in her new book, Hospice or Hemlock?, takes on a particular poignancy. [Putnam's book is] important reading for those on both sides of the debate who are struggling with the potential compatibility of 'hospice' and 'hemlock.'. . . The outstanding mix of sophisticated, well-researched thought and practical insight should make her book of interest both to scholars and to practitioners in the field of end-of-life care, as well as to laypersons who have struggled with these questions in their own lives.
• Endorsement From Margaret P. Battin, Ph.D.
  Professor of Philosophy, University of Utah: How may we face dying? Hospice offers human understanding, control of pain, and a direct, fearless look at death. Hemlock and other forms of physician-assisted aid-in-dying offer the possibility of dying on one's own terms, when one is ready, at the point in one's final illness one chooses. These are the two principal alternatives Constance Putnam explores in Hospice or Hemlock? as she skillfully shows us the shoals over which we navigate in steering between these choices. Both by examining philosophical arguments and by looking at the human faces of the main figures in the right-to-die controversy, Putnam offers us new, important insights about the controversies over the right to die.
• Endorsement From Kristina Snyder, M.Ed.
  Former Director of Hospice and Consultant on Hospice and Elder Services
  Cambridge, Massachusetts: Constance Putnam has presented a thorough study of approaches to dying which need to be discussed more openly, both in health care settings and at home. Avoiding talk about the universal experience of dying only adds to stress and pain when decisions need to be made. In order to make choices that are most appropriate for ourselves and people close to us, we need as much information as possible. Constance Putnam has provided this, not only on a conceptual basis, but by presenting personal portraits of people most influential in the current field of care for dying people.

Table of Contents:

• Foreword
• Preface
• The Matter of Death
• Origins of the Debate
• Whose Death Is It, Anyway?
• Dealing with Death
• Putting Principles into Practice
• Death Matters
• Bibliography
• Index