SPRINGFIELD, Ore. — In a white-walled hospital room, pancreatic cancer slowly drained all the life that remained in Carolyn.

There was nothing more to do for this 62-year-old woman — no oxygen or other life support, just a morphine drip to keep her as comfortable as possible.

That, and the ministrations of Jane Franz.

Franz brought her harp to the foot of Carolyn's bed and started to play, weaving a hypnotic and soothing melody. Occasionally, she paused to adjust to the rhythm of Carolyn's heartbeat and breathing. After 20 minutes, the last notes settled like a benediction over the room.

Three family members sat at her bedside, sometimes holding hands. There were tears and hugs. Franz returned the next day to play one last time, and then Carolyn died.

This is what Franz does. As a music-thanatologist on the staff of Sacred Heart Hospital, she uses music to bring comfort to the dying.

"Doctors can write lots of medical prescriptions and not get the right response," said Dr. Stewart Mones, medical director at Sacred Heart. "There are times when no medicines are as effective as music therapy."

Music-thanatology — "Thanatology" derives from "Thantos," the Greek word for death — has been around in various forms for centuries. Its roots extend at least back to the monastic medicine of Benedictine monks in 11th-century France.

As practiced today, it was developed over more than 30 years by Therese Schroeder-Sheker. Her Chalice of Repose program moved to the quiet farm country of the Willamette Valley south of Portland in 2002.

It stresses carefully individualized "prescriptive music," a concept Schroeder-Sheker developed in which a harpist observes the body processes and mental state of a patient and adjusts tone and tempo to match.

Music thanatologists say they use the harp for the many sounds it can make and for its warm, low, resonant tones. And it's portable.

Their "vigils," as they are called, are held at no cost to the patient at a growing number of hospitals and hospices across the United States and elsewhere.

Chalice grew from Schroeder-Sheker's work as an orderly in a geriatric home. She saw that people often died alone in a room with nothing more than canned laughter from TV sitcoms.

She began using music to care for the dying in 1973. She recalls the throes and death rattles of an often-abusive emphysema patient assigned to her in the home. She held his hand, called his name, made eye contact, found herself singing softly to him: "The Mass of the Angels," "Adoro te Devote," "Salve Regina."

The thrashing stopped. The rattle quieted.

From that moment, a movement has grown.

"We come in with this music that does whatever it does for the patient and the family," said Franz, who heads the program at the Peace-Hope campus of Sacred Heart and the new two-year music-thanatology program at Eugene's Lane Community College, a first for a public institution. It will graduate its first class of nine in July.

Lane stresses an intensive monthly training class for two years; students commute from as far away as Utah. They seek certification through the independent Music-Thanatology Association International; 38 have been certified to date.

The thanatologists respond to requests and referrals from doctors, social workers, families and nurses. The programs are not tied to any church and do not discriminate on basis of faith.

In the struggle at the end of life, Mones said, music-thanatology is an important factor in dealing with emotional and physical issues. "When the music begins to play, I have seen shoulders relax, I have seen people take a deep sigh. Emotions bubble to the surface."

Sharilyn Cohn, who co-directs Portland's nonprofit Sacred Flight, which contracts with 15 Portland-area hospitals, said every encounter is unique. She said the music is viewed as a compound medicine in which melody, harmony and rhythm combine to soothe the patient and the family.

The intention, she says, is to help patients let go when they are ready.

"At the end of life, our job and our desire is not to engage people, to engage their minds, to have them hook onto specific thoughts or memories," Franz said, but rather to have them recognize and flow with melody, "to offer an atmosphere in which they can do whatever they need to do at whatever level they need to do it while the music is present and because the music is present."