The Authority over Dying

Medicine, Religion, and the Division between Management and Meaning in Child Death

Abstract

This article examines the reconfiguration of authority over dying in the West through the relationship between religion and medicine, with particular attention to child death. It departs from the understanding that death is not merely a biological event, but an experience that requires both practical management and symbolic intelligibility. In pre-modern societies, these dimensions were integrated within a religious framework that articulated rituals, interpretations, and social organization of dying. With the advent of modernity, death became increasingly medicalized and institutionalized, with medicine assuming technical authority over the dying process, especially within the hospital setting. This shift, however, did not absorb the symbolic dimension into biomedical knowledge, but instead produced a separation between the control of the body and the attribution of meaning. Child death emerges as a critical point in this configuration, revealing the limits of biomedical rationality when confronted with a loss that resists symbolic integration. The article argues that contemporary authority over dying is distributed and structurally incomplete, involving the interplay between technical decisions, moral mediation, and symbolic interpretation, particularly visible in the field of palliative care.