At the end of January 2014 I learned that I had been successful in winning a Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator Award in the Medical Humanities. The new project starts on 1st March 2015 and is focussed on improving our understanding of interventions at the end life. It will take a global perspective and will… Continue reading
It is not uncommon to refer to the United States as the most ‘death denying’ culture in the world. As one wag observed, ‘Americans don’t die, they just under achieve’. Certainly America spends unprecedented amounts on health care in the last year of life – apparently in search of life extension, but often it seems… Continue reading
By the late nineteenth century, the people of Europe and North America were living longer and in societies of rapidly increasing size. A transformation of unprecedented proportions had brought industrialisation, urbanisation, geographic mobility, the rise of scientific rationalities, political and ideological upheaval, and a growing questioning of religious values. The population of Europe had doubled… Continue reading
Interventions at the end of life – social, comparative and historical analysis to promote global improvement. It’s an unwieldy title and it contains a lot of dimensions. It will be a challenging project to design, to conduct and to deliver. But what an opportunity to invest major time and resources in an issue of such… Continue reading
To paraphrase the Beatles, it was 20 years ago this summer that a remarkable group of clinicians, academics and activists got together under the patronage of the billionaire philanthropist, George Soros, to create an initiative with the disarming goal of transforming the culture of dying – in a society that is perhaps more death… Continue reading
A new report has just appeared from the excellent Atlantes team at the University of Navarra in Spain. It sets out a detailed description of the development in Europe of palliative medicine as a field of specialisation. This is a challenging issue to study, in a context where modes of accreditation, licensing and associated procedural… Continue reading
Providing care for people at the end of life is now a pressing humanitarian issue for the 21st century. Yet it is also becoming the focus of divided opinion, conflicting professional standpoints, disagreements about the quality and significance of clinical evidence, and competing models of care delivery. Meanwhile population ageing, changing patterns of mortality and… Continue reading
