This article speaks to the attitude of intensive care doctors, who are involved with acute specialties, toward the process of death. Two recent events in the United Kingdom have brought the topic of “prolongation of life” to the fore, one was the Tony Bland case, the saga of a young disaster victim who lay in a vegatative state for several years, and the other the Nigel Cox affair, a story of a doctor who administered a fatal injection to a patient when he could not otherwise alleviate her pain.