ITToday, in the 21st century, the options for end of life care are endless; nursing homes, hospices, outpatient nurses, care assistants, family support, etc. are just some of the possible choices. The techniques and approaches regarding the end of life are similar: there is surgical care; there is palliative care, living wills, euthanasia, artificial organs/replacement, "full code" versus "DNR" in hospitals, etc. Although some argue that more options can be overwhelming, the quality of life and end-of-life solutions are unquestionably better than any time in American history. (1) Until the mid-1900s, the end of life could be summed up succinctly: if you were wealthy and simply elderly rather than infirm, you had the means to hire staff and support yourself well with material goods. If you were poor, you had to rely on your family to take care of you, otherwise you would live a beggar's life and/or be lost in a workhouse, also called a workhouse, where your fellow citizens ranged from drug addicts/alcoholics to mentally insane, in passing by homeless people or criminals. . Additionally, if you were sick and came from a poor background, death was almost certain: in 1900, life expectancy was only 49 years, which is even a statistic near the beginning of the improvement life expectancy; the lifespan was even shorter before. (1), (2) Even the wealthy citizen would have difficulty surviving if he were sick. Antibiotics and modern medicine were not developed (Sir Alexander Fleming only discovered penicillin in 1928!) and money could only buy relief rather than a cure for illness. Today we associate churches and religion with health services like the Red Cross and concepts like “sanctuary.” In the past, the Church did not provide general sanctuary to the infirm or elderly for end-of-life care. Some private...... middle of paper ......sometimes suspected of ethics and morality. For example, some hospital staff follow an informal “slow code”: instead of attempting to save a patient; delays are made before help is offered so that the incident becomes a finality, thus avoiding care, suffering, a prolonged life, whatever interpretation one chooses to make. (8)Works cited1. http://www.4fate.org/history.html2. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/27/business/27leonhardt_sidebar.html3. http://inventors.about.com/od/pstartinventions/a/Penicillin_2.htm4. http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/folktexts.html5. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/nursingh.htm6. http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/support/end-of-life-care7. Principles of Biomedical Ethics Beauchamp, TL, Childress, JF, 6th edition, Oxford Press, 20098. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/08/ 02 /MNGMJ816F41.DTL