The perspective of patients

Abstract

This relatively short chapter draws on the – unfortunately rather rare – personal testimonies of dying patients and of those who took care of them as well as on literary, fictional accounts, in order to throw some light and personal, subjective experience of suffering in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It stresses the importance of class and, more concretely of housing conditions for the experience of dying, at a time when most people still died at home. I hints at major features of the personal experience of dying, such as a sense of powerlessness and irritation. Last but not least, it traces the effects of an ongoing loss of religious certainties, which made the physical suffering of dying appear as all the more meaningless and which could also lead to considerable tensions and conflicts between patients and confessional caregivers.