Humanism

Beth saw her first dead body of the day just as she was leaving the emergency department. Earlier, she’d admitted a patient with the coronavirus; now she was on her way to an upstairs doctor’s [...]

Despite the pervasiveness of regret, doctors often overlook it. We often don’t explore the role regret might be playing in the distress many patients and families experience, or acknowledge it [...]

It was the most important thing I would do that week. One morning, I walked around the hospital introducing myself to patients. I stopped by the room of a woman in her late 80s with dementia. Her [...]

How should you live when you know you’re going to die? It is perhaps the ultimate, eternal question — one we all have to grapple with, but mercifully, don’t have to, until the end is crystallized [...]

Christmas week is a strange time in the hospital. There’s an added melancholy for patients who spend the holidays hospitalized — a sense that their illness, whatever it might be, is so bad they [...]