When we mourn, it should be the loss of love that makes us grieve, not the guilt that we did something wrong.
Dying begins with the first act of life.
Even putting aside the Judeo-Christian morality upon which the Constitution and our nation's culture are based, the notion of forced euthanasia would contradict the long-held body of medical ethics to...
...my patient needed a great deal of reassurance that there had been nothing unusual about the way her mother died, that she had not done something wrong to prevent her mother from experiencing that "...
Bioengineers but by those who know who we are.
Although it is not always admitted, the hospital has offered families a place where they can hide the unseemly invalid whom neither the world nor they can endure. … The hospital has become the place o...
The growing professional disciplines of medical ethics and bioethics have had a profound impact on researchers, bedside doctors, associations of physicians, and government.
The last hours. In fact, they are abandoned, to the good intentions of highly skilled professional personnel who barely know them.
Today the law defines death, with appropriate blurriness, as the cessation of brain function. Though the heart may still throb and the unknowing bone marrow create new cells, no man's history can outl...
Knowledge without wisdom is a clear and present danger
Human beings are capable of the kind of love and loyalty that transcends not only the physical debasement but even the spiritual weariness of the years of sorrow.
The kind of child our society resembles just now is one whose intelligence far exceeds his maturity. Every teacher and every parent knows what a formula for disaster that can be.
The ultimate aim of the scientist is not only knowledge for the sake of knowledge, but knowledge with the aim of overcoming that in our environment which he views as hostile. None of the acts of natur...
Nature is being kind without knowing it, as nature can be cruel without knowing it.
When my time comes, I will seek hope in the knowledge that insofar as possible I will not be allowed to suffer or be subjected to needless attempts to maintain life; I will seek it in the certainty th...
Whatever mystery attaches to such a death is imposed on it by those who live. It is a tribute to the human spirit that the life preceding triumphs over the ugly events that most of us will experience...
This is the period when hard decisions are faced by families, having to do with the insertion of feeding tubes and the vigor with which medical measures should be taken to fend off those natural proce...
The only certainty, whether spoken or not, is that the doctors, nurses, and technicians are fighting not only death but their own uncertainties as well. In most resuscitations, those can be narrowed d...
Since human beings first began to write, they have recorded their wish for an idealized ending some call the good death, as if any of us can ever be sure of it or have any reason to expect it. There a...
Before you conclude that your options are limited, you need evidence that you cannot do something, rather than just deciding that you cannot do it.