Science and Health—Possibilities, Probabilities, and Limitations

Up until just a few years ago, a tour of the exhibition of art works now on display at the Museum of Natural History would have left the impression, in most minds, of events very remote in time, pieces of very ancient history, a strange and disturbing world now well behind us. For the modern mind, especially the everyday modern mind now so adept at dismissing the memories of the great wars of this century with all those deaths, the notion that great numbers of human beings can die all at once from a single cause is as far away and alien as the pyramids. Even more strange is the notion that human death could ever be so visible, so out in the open. Our idea about death is that it takes place privately, in the dark, away from other people. There is something faintly indecent, wrong, about dying in full view of the public.