Dignity in hospice work and pastoral care

Abstract

Cicely Saunders (1918–2005), the founder of the modern palliative medicine and hospice movement, describes dignity in the last phase of life essentially in three aspects: It is about indiscriminately taking each person’s life seriously, about respecting their needs (e.g. symptom relief, biographical work, etc.) and about good support until the last breath. The term “Ars moriendi”, which originates from the late Middle Ages, could be contemporary understood as the guarantee of dignity in dying. It is not primarily about the much-discussed “self-determined dying”, but about a network of tasks of everyone involved to make a good life possible until the end.