Human and Person When Life Is Fragile: New Relationships and Inherent Ambivalences in the Care of Dying Patients

Abstract

In this paper, we focus on how medical staff care for people who are dying and on the increasing use of diverse technologies to ease the experience of dying. Because it is accepted patients cannot recover, the primary value to preserve life underpinning much of biomedical practice is contrasted by a commitment to make people’s last period of life as fulfilling and meaningful as possible. Drawing on illustrative cases from an ethnography of palliative care in central London, we discuss how these different priorities construct the patient in different ways. We present two different repertoires of practice, the first of which cares for human life, while the second adopts an idea of personhood to support and maintain patients’ social ties with the wider world. The two concepts inscribe different boundaries of the patient and can help guide what might be the best thing for staff, patients, and others to do. Our examples show that while these two repertoires can emerge in tension in end-of-life care, they are never fully opposites. We argue for a reaffirmation of the concept of the person to accompany contemporary posthuman and more-than-human debates in order to think about “more-than” beyond a focus on the material.