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447 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. vii (1980)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0447 and id is 1 raw text is: PREFACE The complex social and cultural phenomenon with which this special issue of The Annals is concerned has been aptly called The Rediscovery of Death Since 1960 by French historian Michel Vovelle, a contributing author to this volume. The phenomenon is the exponential growth of interest in the subject of death and dying that has been occurring during the past fifteen years in certain contemporaneous Western societies-above all, in the United States, and various northern European countries, such as France, Great Britain, and the Netherlands. Philosopher Maurice Natanson has observed that: The injunction. to philosophize is to learn how to die is hardly characteristic of present-day philosophy, yet the questions which are implied by that injunction have returned to unsettle us. . . . How is death to be defined? What are the rights of the dying? Is abortion justified? Is euthanasia condonable? Is suicide defensible? In a way, the oldest questions have returned not to haunt us but to . . make us wonder how it was possible that they ever departed. . . .' The recent collective preoccupation with death was largely unantici- pated. This is because it did not fit widely shared, scholarly and popular notions about expected developments in modern, Western, urban, industrialized, and secularized societies. Furthermore, it ran directly counter to the common assumption that death had become a taboo topic in contemporaneous Western culture-especially, in present-day American society, where the denial of death supposedly prevailed. The new interest in death that surfaced in the 1960s has not only persisted throughout the 1970s, it has expanded. As Michael Simpson has ironically commented in his introduction to the fourth edition of his annotated bibliography on Dying, Death and Grief: Death is a very badly kept secret; such an unmentionable . . . topic that there are over 750 books now in print asserting that we are ignoring the subject.2 This special issue of The Annals was planned to do more than contribute still another series of assorted essays on death to what may already be an overabundant literature. The authors and articles were selected to suggest, in a mosaic-like way, that the concerned interest in death and dying is a manifold phenomenon and that its prominence is partly attributable to a multiplicity of important social, cultural, and historical developments from which it has emerged. The papers in this issue identify and analyze numerous sources and consequences of the remarkable crescendo of . . . discussion about death and dying.3 Individually and in aggregate they offer a multifaceted interpretation of the effervescence around death and dying 1. Maurice Natanson, The Nature of Death: Editorial (and Bibliography), The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, vol. 3, no. 1, March 1978, p. 1. 2. Michael A. Simpson, Dying, Death and Grief: A Critically Annotated Bibliography and Source Book of Thanatology and Terminal Care (New York: Plenum Press, 1979), p. vii. 3. Louis Lasagna, Deathwatch, The Sciences, December 1979, p. 17. vii

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