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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]