The question of a good death, of dying with dignity, however, has a far longer history. Philosophers, poets, divines and those about to die have long pondered and refined ars moriendi: “the art of ...

While this may pass as an example of the art of death on a certain plane, and might have come, with much more expenditure of pathos, out of the pages of Stowe or Dickens, it is hardly a death that ...