Phenomenology and ethics of terminal pain. Cicely Saunders’ proposal

Differently from pre-technological societies, the contemporary one, when faced with pain, always thinks it can prepare a therapeutic response using the technique as the most valid form to dominate it. However, medicalization and pharmacology of pain prevent it from becoming language. Thus, medical progress makes men much more vulnerable to pain. If, on the one hand, the benefits of anesthesia constitute an unparalleled achievement, on the other, they generate a sense of indifference to life. This is precisely why it is important and urgent to return to listening to the cry of pain. In this sense, particularly commendable were the efforts of Cicely Saunders, who dedicated her entire life to listening to pain and made listening to pain the cornerstone of the philosophy of the Hospice Movement. Therefore, this paper aims to propose a reconstruction of the phenomenology of terminal pain that emerges in Cicely’s writings, highlighting its particularity and usefulness in designing a better approach to pain management. Terminal pain has a strong ethical dimension that requires not only a therapeutic but, above all, an ethical response. The proposal of care that derives from Saunders’ reflections focuses on the direct encounter with the other caught in its aspect of contact and restores importance to the medical art imagined as “pathic,” which, based on a complete or comprehensive wisdom, surpasses the classical humanistic vision and dichotomy which separates it from the purely biomedical one.