How to Die Well / Lydia Dugdale (From the Archives)

Why don’t more doctors talk about death? Dr. Lydia Dugdale has been asking this question since she was a medical student. She is the Silberberg Professor of Medicine and directs the Center for Clinical Medical Ethics, and two books on how we die, including "The Lost Art of Dying."

"Most medical professionals today are very unpracticed at talking to patients about their mortality," she says.

Not only unpracticed, but even themselves afraid.

In this bonus clip from Episode 232 with Macie Bridge, Dugdale traces the path from that early perplexity on the wards to the *ars moriendi*, the medieval art of dying, grounded in the idea that dying is part of living, so if you want to die well you have to live well.

Lydia comments on the emergence of palliative care and the way it let physicians hand conversations about death to specialists; the doctor who inherited the priest's old place at the threshold between life and death; the death anxiety clinicians carry without examining; virtue as preparation for dying, and community as the other half of living well; the unrepresented patients of New York City who die alone; and a grumpy old man, hospitalized for 20 years, who wept when she read aloud what she had written about him.

Episode Highlights

- “Most medical professionals today are very unpracticed at talking to patients about their mortality.”

- “we are really the intermediaries between life and death, I'm not saying we're priests, but that used to be the role of the priest. And so it is now the role of the physician.

- “If you want to die well, you have to live well.”

- We have to be all in or we end up like all of these patients here in New York City who have no one that I can reach out to as they're dying.

- “He started weeping and he said, someone finally saw me. Someone finally saw me. I've been in this hospital for 20 years and I didn't think anyone ever saw me.”

About Lydia Dugdale