Lydia Dugdale, MD, author of "The Lost Art of Dying" will deliver the Trent Center's 2026 Emerson Lecture on Thursday, March 26th.
Many people today experience medicalized dying processes that fail to align with their values and wishes. Clinicians often perceive this misalignment as dying poorly. However, a series of handbooks from the late Middle Ages—known collectively as the ars moriendi—made clear that to die well, one must live well. Dr. Dugdale explores whether the wisdom of the ars moriendi can be revived for our current day
Lydia Dugdale, MD, MAR (ethics), is the Dorothy L. and Daniel H. Silberberg Professor of Medicine at the Columbia University Medical Center and Director of the Center for Clinical Medical Ethics. She also serves as Co-Director of Clinical Ethics at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Irving Medical Center.
A practicing internist, Dr Dugdale moved to Columbia in 2019 from Yale University, where she previously served as Associate Director of the Program for Biomedical Ethics. Her scholarship focuses on end-of-life issues, the role of aesthetics in teaching ethics, moral injury, and the doctor-patient relationship. She edited Dying in the Twenty-First Century (MIT Press, 2015) and is author of The Lost Art of Dying (HarperOne, 2020), a popular press book on the preparation for death. Dr Dugdale attended medical school at the University of Chicago, completed residency training at Yale-New Haven Hospital, and holds a MAR in ethics from Yale Divinity School.
The Nancy Weaver Emerson Lectureship in Medical Ethics brings nationally-renowned speakers to Duke University to address important ethical issues in medicine. Established in 1997, the lectureship honors the late Nancy Weaver Emerson, an advocate who spread hope to many and was an unflagging example of how to find the “can” in cancer. Past recipients have included Victoria Sweet, Jeremy Sugarman, and Carl Elliott.