Paper short abstract:

The modern medical view has seen death as failure. This panel suggests that medically death is increasingly seen as a resource. This paper examines this in relation to discourses and practices of organ donation in Iceland which it links to earlier conceptions of grief as an opportunity for growth.

Paper long abstract:

Long-standing views in the social scientific account of death, speak of the medicalisation of death in many, particularly western, contemporary societies. According to these views, modern medicine sees death as a failure to be avoided and struggled against. This panel proposes importantly that a fundamental shift in medical views of death has taken place and that as biomedicine inserts itself increasingly into the spaces of dying, and perhaps grieving, death is more and more seen as an opportunity, a resource to be exploited. This paper investigates whether a new medical view on death is emerging in relation to discourses and practices of organ donation in Iceland. It examines the links between the possibly emerging medical view of death as a resource, with earlier conceptions of grief as an opportunity for growth. A connection here is organ donation as a mechanism of grief. The paper discusses how emerging views alter the times of death and the times of grief, not least in relation to the changing broader cultural and political contexts that thus become available to place individual deaths in.