In Medicine, Dying Doesn’t Have to Be a Struggle

Options, Not Treatment, May Be What’s Most Needed at the End of Life

Grandma’s dying.

She lived a full life, but illness is getting the best of her. Could be days, could be weeks, the doctors say—unless, that is, she tries one particular treatment. It’d involve some suffering on her part—needles, tubes, doctors checking up on her and all that—but, if it works, it’d buy her another few months.

The family’s divided: Her daughter says fight the illness, give her everything medicine’s got. Her son doesn’t want her to endure any more pain.

So, which is the right option? When is it time to prepare …

By Paul Bisceglio | January 21, 2016

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

January 19, 2016

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 …

When California Sterilized 20,000 of Its Citizens

The Golden State Was the Most Aggressive in the Country in Deeming the ‘Feebleminded’ and ‘Deviant’ Unfit to Reproduce

By Alexandra Minna Stern | January 6, 2016

Not too long ago, more than 60,000 people were sterilized in the United States based on eugenic laws. Most of these operations were performed before the 1960s in institutions for …

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 …

The Shaman Who Transformed My Schizophrenic Son

After a Decade Cycling Through Hospitals and Drugs, a Trip to Africa and a Foray into Tribal Medicine Gave Our Family Hope

by Dick Russell | March 18, 2015

At the age of 17, after a wonderful summer of fishing and learning to surf, my son, then in his junior year at a Boston high school, told me one …

My Mother Couldn’t Choose Whether to Vaccinate Me for Polio

Dr. Salk’s Great Breakthrough Came 224 Days After I Fell Ill. So All We Could Do Was Head for the Isolation Ward.

by Mark Paul | February 23, 2015

It had been a good year for Lois Mace.

She and her husband, only three years beyond college, had bought their first house. A solid redbrick and clapboard Cape Cod, it …

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