1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910796821303321

Autore

Abel Emily K.

Titolo

Prelude to Hospice : Florence Wald, Dying People, and their Families / / Emily K. Abel

Pubbl/distr/stampa

New Brunswick, NJ : , : Rutgers University Press, , [2018]

©2018

ISBN

0-8135-9391-3

0-8135-9393-X

0-8135-9395-6

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (p. )

Collana

Critical Issues in Health and Medicine

Disciplina

362.17/56

Soggetti

Florence Wald

health policy

home care

hospice care

hospice

public health

MEDICAL / General

United States

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Contents -- 1. Setting the Stage -- 2. Doctor and Nurse -- 3. Caring across Cultures -- 4. Hope, Blame, and Acceptance -- 5. Making Sense of the Findings -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Acknowledgments -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

Hospices have played a critical role in transforming ideas about death and dying. Viewing death as a natural event, hospices seek to enable people approaching mortality to live as fully and painlessly as possible. Award-winning medical historian Emily K. Abel provides insight into several important issues surrounding the growth of hospice care. Using a unique set of records, Prelude to Hospice expands our understanding of the history of U.S. hospices. Compiled largely by Florence Wald, the founder of the first U.S. hospice, the records provide a detailed account



of her experiences studying and caring for dying people and their families in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Although Wald never published a report of her findings, she often presented her material informally. Like many others seeking to found new institutions, she believed she could garner support only by demonstrating that her facility would be superior in every respect to what currently existed. As a result, she generated inflated expectations about what a hospice could accomplish. Wald's records enable us to glimpse the complexities of the work of tending to dying people.