Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: palliative medicine

  • Medicalization of death and dying: Room for growth in end-of-life care

    Rose ParisiAlbany, New York, United States In recent years, the way in which Americans cope with death and dying has evolved considerably and become institutionalized and over-medicalized. Whereas over time people have died in their homes, untethered to wires and machinery, modern medicine has turned people into patients and handed them over to medical professionals…

  • A wrong time to die

    Anthony PapagiannisThessaloniki, Greece Death is the one absolute and unexceptional certainty in life. In the Bible we read that there is a time for everything, including a time to die [Ecclesiastes 3:2]. Is there ever a “right” time to die? Faced with such a question, we often consider that anyone who has achieved their aims…

  • A moonie

    Simon WeinPetach Tikvah, Israel Wally Moon was a legend who stood at least 1.90 meters tall. The most striking things about him were his appearance and his gruffness. When I met him during my residency he was in his early sixties. He had a magnificent girth, fuelled by quantities of non-politically correct food—even then in…

  • Time

    Paul RousseauCharleston, South Carolina, United States Selfishly, time is either too short or too long, the moment never appreciated. Mrs. Jones was a 69-year-old female with widely metastatic ovarian cancer, diagnosed during an emergency room visit for abdominal pain. After consultation with an oncologist, she elected to forgo chemotherapy and was referred for palliative care.…

  • Lessons from the black hole

    Columba QuigleyLondon, United Kingdom The episode occurred some few years ago, when I was working in palliative medicine, caring for those with advanced and often incurable disease. As I walked onto the ward early one morning, a woman whom I had been seeing on a daily basis for symptom control started screaming at me. Only…