How to Die Well / Lydia Dugdale (From the Archives)
For the Life of the World / Yale Center for Faith & CultureShow Notes
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
Lydia Dugdale is a physician and medical ethicist who has spent fifteen years asking why medicine finds death so hard to talk about. She is the Silberberg Professor of Medicine at Columbia, directs the Columbia Center for Clinical Medical Ethics, and co-directs clinical ethics at NewYork-Presbyterian Milstein Hospital, where she still sees patients. She edited "Dying in the Twenty-First Century" and wrote "The Lost Art of Dying," a modern ars moriendi. She trained at the University of Chicago and Yale-New Haven Hospital, holds a master's in ethics from Yale Divinity School, and in 2025 founded the nonprofit Heal the Nation.
Helpful Links and Resources
- “Dying Alone,” the full Episode 232 with Lydia Dugdale and Macie Bridge: https://faith.yale.edu/media/dying-alone - Lydia Dugdale's website: https://lydiadugdale.com/ - The Lost Art of Dying: Reviving Forgotten Wisdom, Lydia Dugdale's book: https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-lost-art-of-dying-ls-dugdale - Dying in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Lydia Dugdale: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262534598/dying-in-the-twenty-first-century/ - Columbia Center for Clinical Medical Ethics, which Dugdale directs: https://www.vagelos.columbia.edu/departments-centers/columbia-center-clinical-medical-ethics - Columbia Center for Clinical Medical Ethics on X: https://x.com/columbia_ccme - Ars moriendi, the medieval art of dying, at the Morgan Library and Museum: https://www.themorgan.org/blog/new-acquisition-ars-moriendi-blockbook - Ars moriendi block book, 1475, at the Library of Congress: https://www.loc.gov/item/2021666798/ - Lydia Dugdale at the Yale Center for Faith and Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/people/lydia-dugdale-md
Show Notes
- Death anxiety in medicine - Why doctors avoid frank conversations about mortality - Palliative care's arrival as a discipline, and what it made possible - Real gains in symptom relief for the sick and the dying - The unintended cost: death conversations outsourced to specialists - Clinicians as intermediaries between life and death - The priest's old
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