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Related Concept Videos

Ethical Issues01:27

Ethical Issues

Nurses are essential in patient care, upholding the ethical principles of their profession and effectively navigating ethical dilemmas. Neglecting ethical issues can lead to inadequate patient care, compromised therapeutic relationships, and moral distress among healthcare workers.
Ethical Concerns in Healthcare:
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Kubler Ross's Stages of Dying01:21

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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jul 25, 2026

A Protocol for Rapid Post-mortem Cell Culture of Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Glioma (DIPG)
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Death brokering: constructing culturally appropriate deaths.

Stefan Timmermans1

  • 1Sociology Department, University of California-Los Angeles, 264 Haines Hall, 375 Portola Plaza, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1551, USA. stefan@soc.ucla.edu

Sociology of Health & Illness
|November 30, 2005
PubMed
Summary

Medical professionals, or death brokers, help make deaths meaningful despite challenges. They offer flexible explanations for end-of-life experiences, reinforcing the need for their expertise.

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Area of Science:

  • Sociology of Medicine
  • Medical Anthropology
  • Cultural Sociology

Background:

  • Mortality creates existential ambiguity in modern life, necessitating cultural coping mechanisms.
  • Medical professionals have historically managed death and dying within institutions.
  • Forensic medicine operates in a complex space between medicine and the legal system.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To examine the persistence of medical death brokering.
  • To understand how medical experts provide cultural meaning to death.
  • To explore the role of medical professionals in managing end-of-life ambiguity.

Main Methods:

  • Analysis of social science literature on death and dying.
  • Examination of the role of medical authorities in interpreting death.
  • Exploration of challenges to medical institutionalization of death.

Main Results:

  • Medical death brokering continues despite challenges from social movements and evolving medical practices.
  • Medical experts provide adaptable cultural narratives that imbue end-of-life events with social significance.
  • These narratives paradoxically heighten, rather than resolve, existential ambiguity surrounding death.

Conclusions:

  • Medical death brokering remains a persistent cultural practice.
  • The creation of ambiguity by medical professionals reinforces the demand for their services.
  • Flexible cultural scripts are key to the ongoing role of medical experts in mediating death.