Dr Scott-Williamson (1965) Science Synthesis & Sanity ISBN 0 7073 0259 5
"This great achievement of making the progress of dying easier, smoother, less painful and more prolonged, has only been effected by working on the basic assumption that the process of dying, common to men, begins at the cradle or earlier, and ends in the grave: that man is, in fact, born but to die. What is the result? Marriage becomes an economic disaster: pregnancy a 'disease of nine months duration': birth a major accident, clumsily designed, demanding interference and anasthesia: infancy the opportunity for repression: childhood a breaking-in to the curb and bit: adolescence a docilisation, a taming to fit the animal for the circus cage of society. In fact in every phase of society and civilisation and at every step, means are adopted to anticipate, to prevent or to correct the emergence of any mystery locked up in the seed of humanity; as though living were some ghoulish supernatural thing of which we were afraid or ashamed. We have remedies for everything: even for living. And so successful are our remedial procedures and preventatve measures that the great majority of us are almost 'cured' of that fell disorder, living."