In 2015, the Supreme Court of Canada struck down criminal laws prohibiting medical assistance in dying (MAID) in its Carter v Canada ruling. Assisted Suicide in Canada delves into the moral and policy dimensions of this case, summarizing other key rulings and subsequent legislation. Travis Dumsday explores thorny topics such as freedom of conscience for healthcare professionals, public funding for MAID, and extensions of eligibility. Carter v Canada will alter Canadians' understanding of life, death, and the practice of medicine for generations. This nuanced work will help readers think through the legal, ethical, and policy issues surrounding assisted dying.

In this original and compelling book, Jeffrey P. Bishop, a philosopher, ethicist, and physician, argues that something has gone sadly amiss in the care of the dying by contemporary medicine and in our social and political views of death, as shaped by our scientific successes and ongoing debates about euthanasia and the "right to die"-or to live. The Anticipatory Corpse: Medicine, Power, and the Care of the Dying, informed by Foucault's genealogy of medicine and power as well as by a thorough grasp of current medical practices and medical ethics, argues that a view of people as machines in motion-people as, in effect, temporarily animated corpses with interchangeable parts-has become epistemologically normative for medicine. The dead body is subtly anticipated in our practices of exercising control over the suffering person, whether through technological mastery in the intensive care unit or through the impersonal, quasi-scientific assessments of psychological and spiritual "medicine." The result is a kind of nihilistic attitude toward the dying, and troubling contradictions and absurdities in our practices. Wide-ranging in its examples, from organ donation rules in the United States, to ICU medicine, to "spiritual surveys," to presidential bioethics commissions attempting to define death, and to high-profile cases such as Terri Schiavo's, The Anticipatory Corpse explores the historical, political, and philosophical underpinnings of our care of the dying and, finally, the possibilities of change. This book is a ground-breaking work in bioethics. It will provoke thought and argument for all those engaged in medicine, philosophy, theology, and health policy.

When Julia Ridley Smith's parents died, they left behind a virtual museum of furniture, books, art, and artifacts. Between the contents of their home, the stock from their North Carolina antiques shop, and the ephemera of two lives lived, Smith faced a monumental task. What would she do with her parents' possessions? Smith's wise and moving memoir in essays, The Sum of Trifles, peels back the layers of meaning surrounding specific objects her parents owned, from an eighteenth-century miniature to her father's prosthetics. A vintage hi-fi provides a view of her often tense relationship with her father, whose love of jazz kindled her own artistic impulse. A Japanese screen embodies her mother's principles of good taste and good manners, while an antebellum quilt prompts Smith to grapple with her family's slaveholding legacy. Along the way, she turns to literature that illuminates how her inheritance shaped her notions of identity and purpose. The Sum of Trifles offers up dark humor and raw feeling, mixed with an erudite streak. It's a curious, thoughtful look at how we live in and with our material culture and how we face our losses as we decide what to keep and what to let go.

Dementia is a particularly cruel and teasing disease for which there is no known cure. No vaccine... and no escape, once it takes a hold. My book is a personal, yet hopefully objective, and sociological, reflection on all aspects of caring for my much-loved Mum throughout the steadily worsening stages of her final (5) years of life... until the Dementia finally reeled in its 'prey.' If it makes a positive difference to just one sufferer, it will not have been written in vain.