Comment: Suffering - Hospice and Palliative Care's Hidden Heritage?

The consideration of concepts of suffering is relatively
under-represented in the palliative care literature, though
clearly pertinent to palliative care practice (1). In seeking to explore some of the factors that have influenced ideas about suffering in hospice and palliative care, this paper uses Margaret Archer’s Realist Social Theory (2) to propose three sets of influences. First, that traditional
Christian theology and existentialism were significant elements of the inter- and post-World War II cultural milieu, encouraging positive evaluations of suffering and helping shape the intellectual climate at a time when hospice ideology was in its infancy. Second, that the rapid post-war advance of secular health science challenged and undermined these positive evaluations of suffering, and (third) that current attitudes and practices represent the evolved synthesis or elaboration of all three.