May 15, 2025
(KFF Health News) – As the country’s incarcerated population ages rapidly, thousands die behind bars each year. For some researchers, medical providers, and families of terminally ill people in custody, Rigsby’s situation — and Moser’s frustration — are familiar: Incarcerated … Read More
April 25, 2025
(The Hedgehog Review) – Ars Moriendi for the Twenty-first Century There have always been many ways of dying badly. In the late eighteenth century, the devout English writer Samuel Johnson struggled furiously and profanely against his own demise, ordering his … Read More
April 24, 2025
(The Guardian) – In a Danish palliative care unit, the alternative to assisted dying is not striving to cure, offering relief and comfort to patients and their families The way we die is a topic of a heated debate in … Read More
March 31, 2025
(USA Today) – Monday marks 20 years since the death of Terri Schiavo, whose landmark case became the symbol of the “right to die” movement, generated political controversy and sparked public outcry as her husband and family members took their … Read More
March 26, 2025
(The Guardian) – During the three months I spent living in the holiday park, walking the cliffs and trying to figure out my life, these responses greatly inspired me. Perhaps, as Wolf Hall author Hilary Mantel alluded to in her … Read More
March 21, 2025
(MIT Technology Review) – The goal of an autopsy is to discover the cause of a person’s death. Autopsy reports, especially those resulting from detailed investigations, often reveal health conditions—conditions that might have been kept private while the person was … Read More
March 18, 2025
(The Atlantic) – The tragedy of people suffering and dying alone is one of the enduring and unaddressed traumas of the pandemic. During early surges, we restricted visits to stop COVID from spreading. Yet even when the number of infections … Read More
February 24, 2025
Nursing Ethics (vol. 32, no. 2, 2025) is available online by subscription only. Articles include:
February 21, 2025
(Aeon) – We can now create compelling experiences of talking with our dead. Is this ghoulish, therapeutic or something else again? These apps and algorithms are part of a growing class of technologies that marry artificial intelligence (AI) with the … Read More
February 17, 2025
(Washington Post via MSN) – In a pastoral Vermont valley, a former hospice chaplain named Suzanne runs a retreat center for artists, health-care workers and educators — and, since mid-2023, terminally ill people seeking a safe, peaceful place to die. … Read More
February 4, 2025
(The Conversation) – Bioethics, a modern academic field that helps resolve such fraught dilemmas, evolved in its early decades through debates over several landmark cases in the 1970s to the 1990s. The early cases helped establish the right of patients … Read More
February 3, 2025
(NPR) – Wildman also wrote about the expert medical care Orli received — and the unwillingness of some doctors and nurses to speak openly and realistically about what she was facing. Wildman believes the medical establishment tends to view the … Read More
February 3, 2025
(The Atlantic) – Some of the most life-threatening impacts of ADHD may be the least conspicuous, experts told me. Missing doctor appointments, forgetting to take medications, and struggling to navigate the health-care system can make existing illnesses worse. What leads … Read More
February 3, 2025
(The Times) – A palliative care doctor is called to A&E to attend to an elderly man who has arrived in severe pain with metastasised prostate cancer. “I just want to die,” he tells her. Yet when she sits with … Read More
February 3, 2025
(Vox) – The people turning to generative AI for their most sensitive messages. Users found AI helpful when writing emails and recommendation letters, and even to spruce up responses on dating apps, as the number of chatbots available for experimentation … Read More
January 17, 2025
(The Hedgehog Review) – The way we observe a death is expressive of our sense of a life’s meaning, of its shape and the terms of its success or failure. The “last ride” for a biker; the gun salute for … Read More
January 9, 2025
(New York Times) – He was a neuropsychiatrist who was studying consciousness when a patient explained what had happened to him, and he realized the phenomenon was real. In early 1988, the British neuropsychiatrist Peter Fenwick found himself drowning in … Read More
December 23, 2024
(U.S. News & World Report) – Nearly 3.1 million U.S. residents died in 2023, according to final data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – roughly 189,000 fewer than in 2022. The age-adjusted rate of mortality in 2023 … Read More
December 17, 2024
(DNYUZ) – In the months since, the angst and depression triggered by his cancer diagnosis no longer hound him, Mr. Blechman said, and he has gained profound insights into aspects of his personality he believes negatively affected his relationships. “Psilocybin … Read More
December 4, 2024
(New York Times) – In the time since she left us, I have thought often of Orli’s question. All that spring, Orli asked, pointedly, why did we think a cure was still possible, that cancer would not continue to return? … Read More
December 4, 2024
Christian Bioethics (vol. 30, no. 3, 2024) is available online by subscription only. Articles include:
November 26, 2024
(New Scientist) – Reperfusion technologies that can reanimate human brains are raising the possibility that death could be a reversible condition, even hours after a cardiac arrest That was when something incredible happened. The cortex turned from grey to pink. … Read More
November 22, 2024
(Plough) – A husband caring for a loved one with dementia finds dark valleys, but also limitless spiritual resources. Sherwin B. Nuland, MD, in How We Die, describes the experience of dementia caregivers as “spiritually exhausting.” At times, that was my … Read More
November 12, 2024
(ProPublica) – “If you don’t look, you’re not going to find,” said Lauri McGivern, medicolegal death investigator coordinator in Vermont’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, chair of the National Association of Medical Examiners’ medicolegal death investigation committee and past … Read More
November 8, 2024
(CNN) – Callahan isn’t afraid of digging into the deep stuff. In fact, he runs toward it. Sometimes, though, he’ll encounter patients who brush him off when they learn he’s a chaplain — they aren’t believers, they tell him, and … Read More
