Permission to die

In the words of the author:

“Never before in the history of mankind is possible to delay death as nowadays. The multiplication of scientific knowledge and technological resources have been unimaginable benefits since a few decades ago.

However, it has also become the time that evolution created its own paradoxes. Death is an event that has medicalized: already few people do so at home, surrounded by their loved ones.

Medical interventions can both offer hope as prolong endless agony.

It is increasingly difficult to establish the limits of medicine in the era of the technological twitching. The furor curandi has blurred the rational horizon as possible. Because of not having learned to stop driven by existential values covering the dignity of life, sometimes medicine – and their patients – are victims of their own “success”.

How to respect the advanced care directives of people? How to move from a curative stage to a palliative care? Who defines the border between the biological life and human existence?

This book collects real cases in which death occurred with respect for the dignity of the dying and others where pseudo-therapeutic cruelty deprived them of their fundamental rights.

So, for more than one year we toured hospitals and talked with patients, families, physicians, nurses, priests and lawyers, and then moved them these dramatic stories to a group of the best Argentine writers so that they developed them in literature.

The stories that you will find in this book trace the profile of the ways in which we die now. The texts have the double condition of meeting a valuable testimonial and a remarkable aesthetic quality. It is literature, but they are also rescued true facts of the shadow that condemns a society which professes a manic denial of death.”

You can download here one of the chapters for free and access to the purchase of the ebook. The book is only available in Spanish.