Dame Cicely Saunders, MD, the founder of the modern hospice movement, died in the hospice she founded. She was one of the great medical humanitarians of our era and I had the great honor of spending about an hour with her preparing for my book Culture of Death. Ralph Nader once said that it is a sign of our times that Jack Kevorkian is the most famous doctor in the world. It should have been Dame Saunders. May she rest in peace.
Notes on Anosmia
One morning several years ago, as my wife, Wendy, and I were having breakfast together, I had…
Empire of Unreality
Shiva Naipaul (1945–1985) was the author of three novels and two books of mordant dispatches from places…
The Dreadful Christ of Pär Lagerkvist
It’s dangerous to meet a god,” says the disgraced Pythia in Pär Lagerkvist’s The Sibyl. Her observation…