When People Die Alone… …A Meditation on Humanity

When Disaster Strikes, Humanity Becomes our Patient.

Commentary Introduction I volunteered at a hospital in Haiti for one week in the month following the disastrous earthquake of January 12, 2010. This article discusses natural disasters in general with a focus on earthquakes , and the geography and timing of patient presentation. I will also discuss the role of family physicians in disaster response, and share my own experience as a resident fam...

Why let people die?

This paper concerns those patients whose brain is irreversibly damaged to the point where they will never recover significant mental life. I examine the reasons which justify the decision to withhold or discontinue active medical intervention in these patients. They involve the identity, quality of life and agency of those beings whom we value as persons.

A Meditation on Meditation and Embodied Presence

The major theories of presence in virtual worlds (social presence, co-presence, self-presence, hyper presence, and external presence) all define presence as an illusion about the virtual-ness of a virtual experience (Schultze, 2010). Their approach implies that we are always present when there is no virtuality. In this essay I will argue that 1) regardless of virtuality, we are almost never pre...

When does a human being die?

For most of human history there has been no particular importance of establishing the exact time of a person's death, only whether the person is alive or dead. With modern medical advances, however, more precise answers are looked for. For a definition of death to succeed is important that it is a universal definition and that under it, all human beings are correctly identified as alive or dead...

When and how to die.