La mortificazione della morte

Starting from the questions that recent pandemic has posed to governments and citizens of the world about the connection between medicine, politics and public health, this essay analyses some of the changes in human attitudes towards death and mortality over the last few centuries through the medium of philosophy and literature. In this perspective, in the first part of the paper the human approach to death and mortality is discussed in the light of the birth of clinic and technology, showing the progressive removal of the perception of the limit experienced by human beings in the contemporary world. In the second part, the issue of human finiteness is treated in the context of the recent pandemic, raising some questions about the loneliness of the dying and the consolatory function of storytelling.