On Death and Dying in American Medicine: A Quantitative Content Analysis of the AMA’s Proceedings

• In Event: 20820 - Section on Medical Sociology Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 5. The Institution of Medicine

Abstract

Medical practitioners are often the last individuals to engage with persons who pass on or as they are dying. Yet despite the primacy and consistency of their presence in the face of death, there exists a paucity of empirical research on how medical personnel define death. In order to address the scarcity of research around the meaning of death among medical personnel, the following study employs the methods of cultural sociology to parse the meaning of death as present in bureaucratic documents of the American Medical Association (AMA). Following previous longitudinal research on the AMA’s House of Delegates Proceedings (HDPs) (see Waitkuweit, 2024), this preliminary study analyzes the documents of the AMA’s HDPs from 1846 to 2024. Through conducting a quantitative content analysis, this study aims to provide a first of its kind longitudinal empirical examination of how physicians in the United States define death and synonymous terms and phenomena. Preliminary results of this dataset from 1846 to 2022 demonstrate a trend in the rise of new terms emerging in the 1980s related to death not previously mentioned in past proceedings: end of life and terminally ill. The paper goes on to describe a preliminary hypothesis as to why such phrases related to death became present in the 1980s and not prior. The paper concludes with a discussion of next steps for the paper in its analysis and potential publication.

Author

• Kevin Hans Waitkuweit, University of Illinois at Chicago