Palliative care has commonly been described as an invention of the twentieth or, at best, the late nineteenth centuries. As this paper shows, the term “cura palliativa” was coined in the Middle Ages, however, and the palliative care of incurable and terminal patients was already the subject of a lively debate from the late sixteenth century onwards. While the term “palliare” was sometimes also understood in its original literal sense of “cloaking” to refer to a treatment which only “covered up” external defects or, even worse, a healer’s incompetence, medical textbooks, case reports, and, from 1692, whole treatises specifically devoted to the topic presented it as a sometimes indispensable alternative to radical, curative treatment. They gave detailed recommendations on the medicines and other therapeutic measures which physicians could use to alleviate pain, nausea, shortness of breath, and other tormenting symptoms and to assure as mild a death as possible. They also warned against futile last-resort measures which threatened to cause dysthanasia or kakothanasia by aggravating the patients’ suffering.