Nursing Inquiry. 2020;27:e12316. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/nin | 1 of 11 https://doi.org/10.1111/nin.12316 © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 1 | INTRODUCTION The concept of medicalisation has been utilised to explore the ways medical thinking has encroached into a number of physiological con‐ ditions, pharmaceutical and medical therapies, social identities and normal human experiences such as ageing and death (Conrad, 2005). An ongoing social and cultural process, medicalisation, also occurs when people participate in the medical appropriation of their be‐ haviours, bodies and identities through a variety of ways, including the internalisation of medical rationales (Nye, 2003). It is also associ‐ ated with the increased prevalence and potency of medical vocabu‐ laries, definitions and models in the personal practices and identities of lay people (Halfmann, 2011). Medicalisation has been applied to the examination of genetic testing for breast cancer (Frank, 2012), mammography screening (Griffiths, Bendelow, Green, & Palmer, 2010) and vaccination for cervical cancer (Vardeman‐Winter, 2012). Although the medicalisation of dying has been well examined (Burgess, 1993; Field, 1994; Seale, 2000), no study to date has con‐ sidered the medicalisation of dying from advanced cancer, and how it is approached as an incurable illness that is the leading cause of premature death in Canada (Canadian Cancer Society, 2013). People are living longer with advanced and incurable cancers (Lage & Crombet, 2011), thereby rewriting the possibilities of medi‐ calisation. The cultural perception of cancer as an acute illness that Received: 18 October 2018 | Revised: 5 July 2019 | Accepted: 9 July 2019 DOI: 10.1111/nin.12316 FEATURE The medicalisation of the dying self: The search for life extension in advanced cancer Shan Mohammed 1 | Elizabeth Peter 1,2,3 | Denise Gastaldo 1,2,4 | Doris Howell 1,5 1 Lawrence S. Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada 2 Centre for Critical Qualitative Health Research (CQ), Toronto, ON, Canada 3 Joint Centre for Bioethics, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada 4 Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada 5 Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, University Health Network, Toronto, ON, Canada Correspondence Shan Mohammed, Lawrence S. Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing, University of Toronto, 155 College Street, Suite 130, Toronto, ON M5T1P8, Canada. Email: shan.mohammed@utoronto.ca Funding information The project was funded by a doctoral fellowship from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the University of Toronto. Abstract Although many studies have previously examined medicalisation, we add a new dimension to the concept as we explore how contemporary oncological medicine shapes the dying self as predominantly medical. Through an analysis of multiple case studies collected within a comprehensive cancer centre in Ontario, Canada, we ex‐ amine how people with late‐stage cancer and their healthcare providers enacted the process of medicalisation through engaging in the search for oncological treatments, such as experimental drug trials, despite the incurability of their disease. The seven cases included 20 interviews with patients, family, physicians and nurses, the analy‐ sis of 30 documents and 5 hr of field observation. A poststructural perspective in‐ formed our study. We propose that searching for life extension enacts medicalisation by shaping the dying person afflicted with terminal cancer into new medical sub‐ jectivities that are knowledgeable, active, entrepreneurial and curative. Participants initially took up medical thinking from the formal oncology system, but then began to apply and internalise medical rationalities to alter their personhood, thereby generat‐ ing new curative possibilities for themselves. For people seeking life extension, the embodied and day‐to‐day experiences of suffering and being close to death became expressed and moderated in fundamentally medicalised terms. KEYWORDS cancer, case studies, death and dying, electronic patient record, end of life, medicalisation, palliative care, poststructuralism