Connection or Conversion? Revisiting International Histories of Hospice Care

• In Event: Death, Religion, and Transnational Approaches (Co-sponsored by Sociology of Religion Section)

Abstract

Hospice is an interdisciplinary approach to end-of-life care that seeks to ease suffering and enhance the quality of dying people’s lives. It first emerged during the 1960s in England and the United States, and as a model of care, it reflected the epidemiological and ideological concerns of its founding mothers, most of whom were white, Christian, middle-class professionals. Despite its historically- and culturally-specific origins, hospice spread across the world and into the global south during the 1980s and 90s. Scholarship on the history of hospice narrates this internationalization in terms of universal relevance; because hospice takes a holistic, human approach to mortality, the story goes, health care providers from all over the world sought to learn from hospice leaders in England and the United States. This paper calls our attention to other possible histories. Beginning with hospice’s origins as a British, evangelical enterprise that gained traction during an era of decolonization, I examine the histories of hospice in selected post-colonial locales in the global south. I ask, to what extent did hospice emerge in these locales from mutual connections between leaders in the global north and global south? Was there an element of conversion, with practitioners in the global north actively seeking to shape the care practices of their international colleagues? What, if anything, does this decolonial lens reveal about global histories of hospice care, and what might it teach us about the challenges of delivering end-of-life care in diverse settings today?

Author

• Ara Allene Francis, College of the Holy Cross