Description: A frank portrayal of the medical care of dying people past and present, The Inevitable Hour helps to explain why a movement to restore dignity to the dying arose in the early 1970s and why its goals have been so difficult to achieve.
Brief description: Emily K. Abel is professor emerita at the UCLA-Fielding School of Public Health. She is the author of many books, including After the Cure: The Untold Stories of Breast Cancer Survivors and Hearts of Wisdom: American Women Caring for Kin, 1850-1940.
Review Quotes: An invaluable contribution. Abel does an admirable job uncovering a topic that was mostly absent in the medical literature. She successfully highlights a striking consequence of medicine's curative paradigm while also recovering the vital work that family and faith performed to fill the gap left by medical professionals in the twentieth century.
--Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences