Modern Death

Description

Nothing is more certain in life than death. Yet recent advances in medicine and technology have dramatically increased our life expectancy, and everything about when, where, how and why we die has changed. The result is that dying is today a more prolonged and harrowing experience than ever before. In Modern Death, the physician and clinical researcher Haider Warraich draws on his expert personal experience as well as on history, culture, theology and legal theory, to tackle important ethical questions that go right to the heart of what it is to be human. He reveals what dying really means in today's medical industrial complex, discusses the ethics of patient proxies, living wills and the right to die, and argues in favour of giving terminally ill patients the right to physician-assisted death. Written by an insightful, new voice in the conversation about death and dying, Modern Death is a heartfelt and inspiring book offering an unabashedly honest perspective, exploring how we can and must do better by the ones we love.

HAIDER WARRAICH is an expert on healthcare and health policy and has contributed to the Guardian, BBC Radio, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe and Atlantic among others. He completed his internal medicine training at Harvard Medical School and is now a Fellow in Cardiovascular Medicine at Duke University. Find out more at scholar.harvard.edu/haiderwarraich

`Elegant and poignant... takes us on an unforgettable journey and gives us remarkable insights about the changing nature of modern death' -- Siddhartha Mukherjee, bestselling author of The Gene `Sensitively grapples with the changing cultural landscape surrounding the end of life... filled with compassionate accounts of the different ways he has witnessed people meet death in the modern age' * Scientific American * `Supplements medical history with tales from the life-death border that are disturbing, bewildering, and inspiring' * Psychology Today * `Melding the curiosity of a historian, the discernment of a physician, and the soulfulness of a poet, Warraich provides us a stunning portrait of death in our moment' -- Dr Rafael Campo, Associate Professor, Harvard Medical School `A rich book... examining everything from the death of a cell to the impact of death on society' * Nature *