A new approach to suffering in life-limiting illness: Total pain, the brain-gut axis, and the human microbiome. Dr Marian Krawczyk talks about her new Carnegie Research Incentive Grant: This grant enables her to conduct a targeted review of literature across social, medical, and biological research to develop an innovative transdisciplinary theory that considers the connection… Continue reading
People with life-limiting illnesses report exceptionally high rates of psychosocial and existential suffering in conjunction with bodily pain. Cicely Saunders famously conceptualized this cumulative distress as ‘total pain’. As you may already know, we’re pretty interested in total pain around here. Professor David Clark has written extensively about it (see here for an overview), and… Continue reading
By Dr Naomi Richards and Dr Marian Krawczyk In November 2018 we exhibited a series of drawings by a renowned Scottish artist showing powerful glimpses of death and dying. The exhibition was shown at the Yellow Door Gallery in Dumfries as part of the UK wide Being Human festival of the Arts & Humanities, and… Continue reading
One of the most fundamental ways we show love and connection is through touch. This behaviour is so central to our understanding of what it means to be in relationship with another person that visual representations of touch have become one of the most common visual forms of ‘shorthand’ to indicate compassionate caring, including at… Continue reading
The Glasgow End of Life Studies Group hosted a very lively and well-attended ‘Talk & Tea’ on March 22nd. The event showcased a range of research and initiatives related to later and end of life, and brought together a diverse group of community members. We organized the event to highlight how our work takes place… Continue reading
This invitation stems from meeting Margaret Dobie, who I first got to know last fall, shortly after I arrived in Dumfries to join the Glasgow End of Life Studies Group. Margaret has attended many of the Group’s community events in Dumfries and Galloway over the last two years, and when I wrote my first post… Continue reading
I have always been fascinated by hospitals. They are spaces where some of the most intense and vulnerable moments of our lives happen, and for many of us, it is also be where we will spend our very last days of life and die. Given the importance of the hospital in our final illness trajectories,… Continue reading
If, like me, you are a citizen of the global North, the statistical probability is that you–after a protracted illness–will spend your last days and die in an acute-care hospital. Increasingly, a good death in these institutions calls for a specific form of medical expertise–palliative care. As a medical anthropologist, one of my main research… Continue reading
