Writing about suffering and death can be a delicate undertaking, since both are connected to so much emotion and so many doctrines. Many received ideas about these subjects arose in the pre-scientific era, when perceptions of medicine were deeply mixed with superstitions and were often based on misinterpretation of various sacred texts. I am going to look at these subjects from a twenty-first-century perspective rather than one formed in the late Iron Age. This may cause some unease to the more conservative reader.