Did people always fight death as they do today, or is today's (American, anyhow) attitude that nobody should ever die a new thing?
I think that people always fought death. Having a strong survival instinct is definitely a Darwinian trait. In other words, organisms (I'm not limiting this to humans) that don't go out of their way to survive tend not to contribute to the gene pool. Male black widow spiders are (nominally) exceptions, of course, but the point is that they manage to reproduce before they go to The Great Web In The Sky.
I agree that Americans somehow think that death is an abnormality and can be avoided if one takes the right vitamins, exercises, and otherwise lives via the health fad du jour. There seems to be an attitude that, if a patient dies, the doctor must be incompetent. We don't even see people die; that's relegated to hospitals and nursing homes.
There's a great line in Woody Allen's Sleeper. His character awakens 200 years in the future and is informed that all his friends are dead. He is incredulous and exclaims, "But the all ate organic rice!"
My wife's father died at home at age 90, with his loved ones surrounding him. To my mind, that beats the hell out of passing on while tubes of various diameters are inserted in every available orifice. Dying is inevitable but some methods are better than others.
