Modern Death: How Medicine Changed The End of Life

Nothing is more certain in life than death. Yet recent advances in medicine and technology have dramatically increased our life expectancy and everything about when, where, how and why we die has changed. The result is that dying is more a prolonged and harrowing experience than ever before.

In Modern Death (published by Duckworth Overlook, 2018), the Harvard based physician and clinical researcher Haider Warraich draws on his expert personal experience as well as on history, culture, and theology to tackle important ethical questions that go right to the heart of what it is to be human. He reveals what dying really means in today’s medical-industrial complex, discusses the ethics of patient proxies, living wills and the right to die and argues in favour of giving terminally ill patients the right to physician-assisted death.