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
I have known and worked with Dr Carlos Centeno since we first met at a conference of the EAPC in Geneva in 1999. Over the years, and as our friendship has grown, we have mainly collaborated on studies associated with the EAPC European Atlas of Palliative Care. Recently, Carlos has established the ATLANTES research programme… Continue reading
I like small scale but clever gadgets. Personal favorites are a 1950s wall hung hand coffee grinder and a steam driven stove top expresso pot. They are human scale technologies. While I gain much from the daily exertion they require, the longer I use them, the more I like to think I am paying my… Continue reading
I have been on the phone for the past hour to a journalist writing an article on Death Cafés and the movement to get people talking about death. Is this, she asked, because death in our society is repressed? Is there a taboo against talking about it? “No,” I answered, “if we need to talk… 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
Hailing from a Dylan Thomas-like diminutive, unassuming, “ugly, lovely” former coal mining village in South Wales, UK – whose inhabitants routinely greet friends and strangers alike with a warm, embracing “Morning!” couched in a melodious Welsh lilt – I could be more readily forgiven for small-town parochialism than any meaningful participation in a global dialogue.… 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
