Is medical control of human aging a worthy goal? Despite the moisturisers you can buy it is impossible to reverse the damage of aging and very few of us will live to anywhere near the theoretical maximum of human age, estimated to be 125. Yet some people think the first person who will live substantially […]
Tag: death
Richard Smith: Confusing animals and people
My Kenyan friend thinks that Americans are mad. He worked for a while in an American hospital, and one day a colleague disappeared for a few hours. When he came back in the afternoon he said that he’d been to his father’s funeral. “He didn’t even seem sad,” said my friend. “In Kenya when a […]
Richard Smith and Melanie Lovell: Should doctors respect patients’ requests not to know?
What follows is an email debate between Melanie Lovell, a palliative care physician in Sydney, and Richard Smith, former editor of the BMJ and chair of Patients Know Best. The debate began when Richard asked if Melanie had seen the editorial that he had written with two colleagues arguing that we need to take a […]
Richard Smith: Talking death with a CCG
Recently I had the privilege of talking with the members of an emerging clinical commissioning group (CCG). (For those who don’t know, CCGs are groups of GPs who will have responsibility for commissioning care for a whole population.) It was my job to try and lift the conversation above governance, finance, and the future of […]
Peter Lapsley: Dignifying death
Were I to develop motor neurone disease, or some comparably progressive, incurable, and terminal condition, I would wish to be informed of the diagnosis, perhaps to have the opportunity of a second opinion, to be given a carefully considered and evidence-based prognosis with timelines, however approximate, and then, having put my affairs in order and […]
Richard Smith: Death festival, day three
I’m up early and off to the death festival for the third day with a very light heart, and we are straight into practicalities. […]
Richard Smith: Death festival: day two
The second day of the festival began with Jude Kelly, the artistic director of the Southbank Centre, explaining that the festival is about “reshaping our ability to look death in the eye, and to have a relaxed way of talking about death.” In a secular age, she says, we don’t have ways of congregating to […]
Richard Smith: Death festival: day one
The Southbank Centre, London’s art centre on the South Bank of the Thames, is holding a festival of death. The aim is “to look death in the eye…to confront mortality head-on through music, theatre, literature, and debate.” […]
Richard Smith: Death becomes fashionable
Death is becoming fashionable. London’s Southbank is planning a two day festival of death, the BMJ has a Christmas editorial urging us to think of death as a friend rather than an enemy, and last week the Centre for Humanities and Health at King’s College London held a death workshop where philosophers and doctors worked […]
David Payne: Best death scenes in literature
Our 19th century ancestors were no strangers to death. So why were they so terrible at writing about it? At a Cheltenham Literary Festival panel discussion on death scenes in literature, science broadcaster Vivienne Parry confessed to “being ready to shoot “ the ailing child heroine Little Nell long before Dickens killed her off in The […]