As medical technology progresses and our species learns more about how our bodies operate the nature of our death becomes increasingly foggy. It seems there can be no real definite resolution about death and it’s impact on our lives and this only gets more difficult as we keep progressing and evolving. In our modern society, does beginning the process of dying immediately strip us of our independence, do we take our family’s independence, or do we just shift the responsibility of death to professionals? In line with that, death can have an intense effect on the structure of family itself. Is the dying exiled, are they cared for very closely, or are they just shipped off somewhere to die hooked up to a machine surrounded by strangers? Many philosophers …show more content…
This then begins to blur the line of when a human dies of natural causes such old age, organ failure, or disease and when a human dies due to a doctor’s moral failure. Callahan seems to think that we bring these problems on ourselves by the way we see ourselves within nature. In the very beginning of chapter two of his book The Troubled Dream of Life he states that “The ambition of modern medicine has been to do something about that seemingly unalterable fact. It has declared war on death, on the ravages of time, and most of all on the nature that brings them about. It has sought through research to combat the the causes of death and constantly to redefine the idea of a premature death” (Callahan 57). What Callahan means by this is that as we continue to further understand the body and to further stave off things that would traditionally bring on death we reach this point of not knowing when death should occur. We, as a species, are not longer sure when someone is supposed to die and when they are, essentially, let to die prematurely. One very good example he gives of this kind of thinking is how “Doctors routinely resist turning off respirators and other life-sustaining machines with irreversibly dying patients, because they experience their actions as tantamount to killing the patient. Those patients, they believe, will die from their action in stopping the machine, rather than from the underlying disease” (Callahan 63). He is saying we don’t see turning off the machine as letting someone die naturally, we see it as letting them die because we aren't’ taking care of them. Even if it is morally wrong to keep someone artificially alive, we don’t want to be the ones to pull the plug as is makes us feel as though we are the killer, not the disease. I think Callahan put it best when he writes “Nature has not disappeared