At the turn of the twentieth century medicines imperative to cure disease increasingly took priority over the demand to relieve pain and suffering at the end of life Filled with heartbreaking stories The Inevitable Hour demonstrates that professional attention and resources gradually were diverted from dying patients Emily K Abel challenges three myths about health care and dying in America First that medicine has always sought authority over death and dying second that medicine superseded the role of families and spirituality at the end of life and finally that only with the advent of the hightech hospital did an institutional death become dehumanized Abel shows that hospitals resisted accepting dying patients and often worked hard to move them elsewhere Poor terminally ill patients for example were shipped from Bellevue Hospital in open boats across the East River to Blackwells Island where they died in hovels mostly without medical care Some terminal patients were not forced to leave yet long before the advent of feeding tubes and respirators dying in a hospital was a profoundly dehumanizing experience With technological advances passage of the Social Security Act and enactment of Medicare and Medicaid almshouses slowly disappeared and conditions for dying patients improvedthough as Abel argues the prejudices and approaches of the past are still with us The problems that plagued nineteenthcentury almshouses can be found in many nursing homes today where residents often receive substandard treatment A frank portrayal of the medical care of dying people past and present The Inevitable Hour helps to explain why a movement to restore dignity to the dying arose in the early 1970s and why its goals have been so difficult to achieve

Author: Lucy McDiarmid Common wisdom has it that when Auden left England for New York in January 1939, he had already written his best poems. He left behind (most critics believe) all the idealisms of the 1930s and all serious concerns to become an unserious poet, a writer of ingenious, agreeable, minor lyrics. Lucy McDiarmid argues that such readers, spoiled by the simple intensities of apocalypse, distort and misjudge Auden's greatest work. She shows that once Auden was freed from the obligation to criticize and reform the society of his native country, he devoted his imaginative energies to commentary on art. And about art he was never complaisant: with greater passion than he had ever used to undermine bourgeois society, Auden undermined literature. Every major poem and every essay became a retractio, a statement of art's frivolity, vanity, and guilt. Auden's Apologies for Poetry, then, sets forth the unorthodox notion that the chief subject of later, New Yorker Auden is the insignificance of poetry. Commenting on all the major poems and essays from the 1930s through the 1960s, and analyzing manuscript revisions and unpublished works, it charts the changes in Auden's poetics in the light of his shift from an oral to a written model of poetry. In his earliest work Auden voices the tentative hope that poems can be like loving spoken words, transforming and redeeming, themselves carriers of value. After 1939 he takes for granted a written model. His later essays and poems deny art spiritual value, claiming that love, or truth in any serious sense is a reticence, the unarticulated worth that exists--if at all--outside the words on the page. Later Auden creates a poetics of apology and self-deprecation, a radical undermining of poetry itself.Originally published in 1990.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.