Medical professionals urged to speak to, learn from dead patients

Published: 2007-03-06

CHICAGO (CNS) -- Those who practice "the finite and fallible craft" of medicine need to forgive themselves and learn to listen to their patients who have died, a Franciscan brother and physician told a group of Catholic ethicists March 1. Brother Daniel Sulmasy, director of the Bioethics Institute at New York Medical College in Valhalla, N.Y., acknowledged that his talk was a departure from the other speeches at the Feb. 28-March 2 conference on "Catholic Health Care Ethics: The Tradition and Contemporary Culture." While most of the other addresses focused on a specific ethical dilemma or field of bioethical study, Brother Sulmasy said he wanted to stimulate conversation about "the spirituality of being a caregiver." "All of those who have ever loved us inhabit us deeply now," he told participants in the conference. "This is true in a smaller way of our patients." Brother Sulmasy spoke at length about the journey he experienced in the late 1990s with a patient named Meg, who died after a long fight with a rare form of cancer. "I went to her funeral," he said. "I needed to be there for Meg, for her friends and for myself, and to let God know that I had done the best that I could as a physician. ... I needed to understand (her death) not just as a notation on her chart."

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