Natural Death and the Noble Savage

The belief that dying and grieving are natural processes is widely held in modern palliative and bereavement care. The article examines four assumptions often made in this connection: 1) that most primitive cultures deal with death in an accepting way, 2) that this way is different from our own, 3) that it is a good and noble way, and 4) that traditional societies see death as natural. These assumptions are not clearly supported by evidence; they draw their plausibility from the myth of the noble savage. Humane approaches to dying and grieving today should be grounded not in mythical notions of the natural, but in the on-going project to develop ways of dying and grieving appropriate to our own time and place.