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<\/a><\/p>\nStarting on Sunday, I\u2019m going to be doing a series of six linked posts on how my exploration of mathematics gave me a framework for understanding and discussing absolute morality. \u00a0Posts topics will include how to be moral when you don\u2019t have perfect knowledge of morality and the ways God is like a cylinder, and why that\u2019s a problem.<\/p>\n
It all kicks off here on Sunday with a post on the superb\u00a0Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Atul Gawande\u2019s piece<\/a> in The New Yorker<\/em> on end of life care has been getting well deserved attention across the blogosphere. \u00a0It\u2019s worth reading the article in full, but, among the most salient points: many patients live longer if they enter hospice earlier, since agressive chemotherapy that has only a small chance of success is massively debilitating. \u00a0From the article:<\/p>\n In ordinary medicine, the goal is to extend life. We\u2019ll sacrifice the quality of your existence now\u2014by performing surgery, providing chemotherapy, putting you in intensive care\u2014for the chance of gaining time later. Hospice deploys nurses, doctors, and social workers to help people with a fatal illness have the fullest possible lives right now\u2026 Hospice and palliative-care specialists aren\u2019t much concerned about whether that makes people\u2019s lives longer or shorter.<\/p>\n Like many people, I had believed that hospice care hastens death, because patients forgo hospital treatments and are allowed high-dose narcotics to combat pain. But studies suggest otherwise. In one, researchers followed 4,493 Medicare patients with either terminal cancer or congestive heart failure. They found no difference in survival time between hospice and non-hospice patients with breast cancer, prostate cancer, and colon cancer.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The American approach to death has shifted wildly in the mere 200 years of our existence. \u00a0One of my favorite books from my \u201cEpidemics in American Culture\u201d class was Drew Gilpin Faust\u2019s\u00a0This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War<\/em><\/a>, which, as the title might imply, had an awful lot to say on this topic. \u00a0For the first time in American history, massive numbers of deaths occured outside of the home, in industrial settings. \u00a0To compensate for this, nurses sent letters home describing the deaths of soldiers that were often complete fabrications, matching and creating expections.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n One final detail on the way our ideas about death have changed: a fascinating post at There I Fixed It<\/a> chronicles the mid-19th century practice of photographing the dead posed with the living.<\/p>\n Keep in mind that photography in the 19th century was an elaborate process; both time consuming and certainly expensive. For many people this was the only photo that would be taken of them. Typically the deceased are depicted as sleeping following through on the notion of death as permanent state of sleep, but also because generally people died asleep in their beds.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Don\u2019t worry, this isn\u2019t going to be a single issue 7 Things on death, the way last week\u2019s turned out to be entirely on statistics<\/a>. \u00a0Here\u2019s a palate cleanser: things smashing into other things. \u00a0In slow motion. (h\/t Andrew Sullivan<\/a>). \u00a0I think I like the egg dropped into a mouse trap best.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/2.bp.blogspot.com\/_b7Eh98KJ_qI\/TFJHP92X4dI\/AAAAAAAABAc\/lGbahv9MRlM\/s200\/faust.jpg\")
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