[Thanatotherapeutics]

Thanatotherapeutics, as "ars bene moriendi", belongs to those services that modern medicine should restore and value most. Its exercise demands examining the plurality and heterogeneity of the discourses about death: the biological, the anthropological, the sociological and the theological, among others. Each one of them has its own context of validity and a proper scope. The association between aging and dying permits a discussion of the disablement process and of social death, as paradigms for the most general features of dying. As a concrete and individual process, death occurs nowadays in hospitals and hospices, this fact being essential for examining it in terms of the actors and agents present in this institutional setting. Some principles are derived and discussed, among them three dimensions deemed relevant for appraising thanatotherapeutic work: what is proper according to art, what is good for the individuals concerned and what is just for the society to which they belong.