A powerful assessment of medicine's involvement with death and dying: a history highly recommended for any medical or ethical issues holding.
(
Midwest Book Review)
Few libraries specializing in the history of medicine will not find this a valuable book to include in their collections.
(Susan Rishworth
Watermark)
This is an important book that sets current debates over end-of-life care in their historical context, and reminds readers of the numerous historical decisions that shape the current situation.
(
Choice)
Abel's book is a strong and welcome addition to the historiography of death and dying.
(Thomas R. Cole
Journal of American History)
An invaluable contribution... Abel does an admirable job uncovering a topic that was mostly absent in the medical literature... She successfully highlights a striking consequence of medicine's curative paradigm while also recovering the vital work that family and faith performed to fill the gap left by medical professionals in the twentieth century.
(Vicki E. Daniel
Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences)
While the work's narrative structure makes it ideal to read as a whole, each chapter could be excerpted in both upper- and lower-level classes in history, health policy, bioethics and religion. The work's accessible style makes it accommodating to undergraduates and laypeople, while its rigorous, inventive methods and ambitious claims ensure its value for scholars... Ultimately, Abel's book is of great importance to not only historical scholarship but also contemporary bioethics and health policy.
(Harold Braswell
Social History of Medicine)
With breadth and compassion, Abel presents a historical moment in health care through the lens of dying patients and their families, and, as such, contributes to our understanding of our modern ethos of medical treatment and medical failures.
(Julie A. Fairman, University of Pennsylvania)
With the immediacy of a novelist and the critical insights of a historian, Emily Abel offers a sobering reinterpretation of medical history from the perspective of the dying. Intimate, eye-opening, and altogether engrossing, The Inevitable Hour should change how we live as well as how we die.
(Alice Wexler, author of
The Woman Who Walked into the Sea: Huntington’s and the Making of a Genetic Disease)
The Inevitable Hour is as much a history of medical care as it is a cultural history of dying in the United States. Through careful and creative scholarship, Emily Abel critically explores key misconceptions in the understanding of care for the dying and undermines the assumptions supporting each. The book clearly documents that disparities exist for the disadvantaged in dying as well as in health status and access to health care. Because many deaths prior to Medicare legislation in 1965 occurred in settings rarely characterized by advances in medical care or in private homes, scholars have paid scant attention to this essential time of life. Abel has remedied that lack. Her work is timely and of considerable import for policy makers, scholars, and the general public as the population continues to age and increasing numbers of the baby boomer generation confront their ‘Inevitable Hour.’
(Andrea Sankar, author of
Dying at Home and editor of
Medical Anthropology Quarterly)
Emily K. Abel is professor emerita and research professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, Fielding School of Public Health. She is the author of several books, including After the Cure: The Untold Stories of Breast Cancer Survivors and Hearts of Wisdom: American Women Caring for Kin, 1850–1940.