Review

Do women ‘do death better’?

Lifting the taboo: women, death and dying
Sally Cline
Little, Brown & Co, 1995, £18.99

Shortly after I received this book my mother died. She died about 12 hours after a frustrating conversation with a female registrar who was unable to admit the possibility of death and who felt that it wouldn’t be worth her doing her job if she ‘gave up on people’.

The same experience of nursing dying people that led me to believe my mother was dying, despite the denials of all around me, also leads me to believe that Sally Cline is wrong when she asserts that ‘many women medics break through, hold onto the notion of care, see the patient as critical as the treatment’.

Cline’s mistake is to interview female paediatricians and extrapolate their comments to the whole of medicine. This suits her cause well, as she has a tendency to suggest that women, simply by being women, somehow ‘do death better’. But where are the comments from male paediatricians to convince us that this is true?

I have met many doctors, both female and male, working in palliative care, who express similar sentiments about caring, and many surgeons (although admittedly fewer female) who would struggle to identify the place of care in their work. To make assumptions purely on the basis of gender seems to me naive, but this is a major flaw throughout.

The book claims to be ‘pathbreaking’ but where the path is leading is unclear. Undoubtedly Cline has benefited greatly from her wider reading—from the Open University’s ‘Death and Dying’ course material, for example—but her application of the material is confused. So she is happy to refer to the notion of pathological grief in one part of the book, while dismissing it in another.

This lack of rigour appears elsewhere: bereaved fathers appear to express less emotion than bereaved mothers, Cline notes, and goes on to say that it is unclear whether they actually experience less emotion or whether their grief is not given expression. I suspect many people would agree with this but I find her earlier assertion that ‘it is mothers for whom the death of a child is part of the special female mode of experiencing death from the inside’ less convincing, based as it is on interviews with a relatively small number of mothers and no fathers.

Perhaps I am simply too pragmatic, but the romantic and emotional style of this writing irritates me — I want useful arguments rather than structureless prose. And I have to admit to an instant prejudice against someone who acknowledges all the doctors she interviews by their full name, title and status, while nurses have to make do with first names only. Not good in my book!