A Good Death

A Good Death

The Institute of Medicine defines a good death a "one that is free from avoidable death and suffering for patients, families and caregivers in general accordance with the patients' and families' wishes." The current system creates barriers to reducing the stress and suffering that accompany a patient's end of life. Data and eHealth technology, if it were more accessible, could help patients, fa...

Criteria for a good death.

This brief paper advances the concept of a "good death," outlines ten specific criteria for a good death, and proposes a simple golden rule for optimal dying.

The good death.

A good death---Ebola and sacrifice.

A friend of ours, Dr. Sam Brisbane, died recently. He was a Liberian doctor, and he died from Ebola, a horrible, nightmarish disease. Information coming out of Liberia has been scarce. Since Dr. Brisbane’s death, we’ve learned that other doctors and nurses with whom we’ve worked have also contracted Ebola and have died or are being treated in the types of rudimentary facilities we see on the ne...

Good and bad death: introduction.

The idea for this collection arose during a workshop chaired by Sjaak van der Geest, for which Clive Seale wrote an initial review paper (Seale 2000), and took place in November 2000 at the 15th Social Science & Medicine conference in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. The workshop provided participants with a fascinating opportunity to explore the considerable cross-cultural variation in patterns of ...