Has Modern Medicine Made Dying Harder Than Ever?

Hospitals Have Gotten Better at Keeping Us Alive, But That Also Means Thornier Questions at the End of Life

In his 2010 New Yorker essay “Letting Go,” surgeon Atul Gawande stops by the intensive care unit at his hospital and describes the sad state of its patients at the very end of their lives. While two out of 10 patients there are likely to make it out of the hospital, the others, he says, are more like an 80-year-old woman with irreversible congestive heart failure, “who was in the ICU for the second time in three weeks, drugged to oblivion and tubed in most natural orifices and a few …

January 19, 2016

Why We Need to Name the Dead

Descendants and Surviving Family Insist That Ordinary People Had Lives Worth Noting

By Thomas W. Laqueur | December 18, 2015

Almost 3,000 migrants have drowned this year trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea from Africa to Europe. Many of their bodies have washed ashore without names. These are bodies of …

Exits

By Nancy Johnson James | December 11, 2015

I saw a woman decaying on the street.
Not waiting for her light. Not looking, not caring and
No one hit her.

Later
I saw a woman with anger crusted
In …

Stuffed Lines

By Arthur Vogelsang | December 4, 2015

When dead (when you’re dead), jealousy feels six times worse, otherwise everything is the
Same deal. Back in life, they put my intimate, personal letters in the second-best collection …

I Fear the Coldness of Doctors

If We Don't Encourage Them to Have Empathy, Both They and Their Patients Will Suffer

By Marjorie Podraza Stiegler | October 29, 2015

Earlier this year, a doctor I’d never met told me about the death of one of his patients:

I remember so well the morning our medical examiner came into my …

Still Life with Ivory

By Brad Aaron Modlin | October 16, 2015

If I could move I’d close the shutters he left open. I’d trap the windowsill blackbird in the house.

If I could move I’d take the pears—almost rotten as usual—from their …

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