When I arrived at the beginning of September 2021, the summer was still lingering. I immediately fell in love with Crichton Campus, ‘a place to breathe’, as displayed on the welcome sign. Experiencing the beautiful parkland estate surrounding the School of Interdisciplinary Studies, the home of the End of Life Studies Group, has added an… Continue reading
‘Total Pain’ as the Pain of a Lifetime This post looks at Cicely Saunders’ influential term ‘total pain’ in terms of endings and limits. ‘Total pain’ articulates how pain for someone whose life is ending is a whole overwhelming experience which combines physical, psychological, social and spiritual elements. My own PhD project looks at how… Continue reading
Coronavirus is changing the way we live in a way that is repeatedly said to be unprecedented. We say we are living through strange times, extraordinary times, difficult times. For some of us lucky enough to be able to work from home time might be stretching out in lockdown into an endless series of Thursday… Continue reading
One of Dame Cicely Saunders’ most enduring legacies is the importance of being present, of witnessing, at the end of life. Academic witnessing at the margins of life and death can require balancing an intense intimacy with simultaneously gaining enough distance to ‘see’ significant or representative broader concepts. What does this mean for us as… Continue reading
Suffering and pain present both practical and theoretical problems. This might be surprising. Having long faced the problem of pain, we might have expected it, by now, to be solved. Pain treatment, however, remains woefully inadequate. Chronic pain is not only often incurable and difficult to manage, it is proliferating. Pain treatment and management are… Continue reading
Cicely Saunders once stated that ‘suffering is only intolerable when nobody cares’. Yet suffering is a broad concept with many aspects. Members from the Glasgow End of Life Studies Group recently attended a two-day philosophy conference entitled ‘Suffering and Autonomy at the End of Life’. Speakers came from a range of academic disciplines – including… Continue reading
What does it mean to have a good death? The best way of answering this question takes us via a philosophical theory of the good life. Central to living a good life is the value of autonomy: deciding for yourself what is valuable and living your life in accordance with that decision. Autonomy is an… Continue reading
Lars Johan Materstvedt, a professor of philosophy working in medical ethics, writes in response to Professor David Clark’s post Assisted suicide, euthanasia and the European Association for Palliative Care (EAPC). Lars Johan is former Chair of the Ethics Task Force on Palliative Care and Euthanasia at the EAPC. The EAPC on euthanasia, 2003 and 2016 After reading… Continue reading
