It has been, I think, extraordinarily difficult for modern medicine to accept the notion of palliative care of the dying. This acceptance appears to have been hampered by two dominant notions in medicine: (1) that cure is always the highest and best goal and (2) that death is always the worst outcome. Much of the language of medicine lags behind the broader acceptance of death as one part of the process of living. It seems it may take a generation of evolution in the language to get all of the words and phrases adjusted to a newer medical view which accepts death as something other than a defeat for the physician.