About the Authors

Patricia Benner, R.N., Ph.D., is Professor of Physiological Nursing at UCSF and has written extensively on issues in critical care. Recent articles include "A Dialogue between Virtue Ethics and Care Ethics" and (co-authored) "The Nurse as a Wise, Skillful and Compassionate Stranger." Book-length publications include Caregiving: Readings in Knowledge, Practice, Ethics, and Politics (co-edited) and Clinical Wisdom and Interventions in Critical Care: A Thinking-In-Action Approach (co-authored).

Thomas Cole, Ph.D., is Professor of History at the Institute for the Medical Humanities, University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston, Texas. He is the author of the classic history of aging, The Journey of Life: A Cultural History of Aging in America.Ê His current project is a documentary film entitled Anatomy and Humanity: Conversations with Donors and Dissectors.

Poet and essayist Sandra Gilbert, Ph.D., is Professor of English at UC Davis. She has published numerous works of poetry, including Emily's Bread and Ghost Volcano; the list of book-length publications includes the classic feminist study, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (with Susan Gubar), and Wrongful Death: A Medical Tragedy.

San Francisco based photographer Jim Goldberg has exhibited his work in numerous solo shows around the United States and in Europe. In Raised by Wolves, he took up the lives of children on the streets; in his contribution to the Hospice show, originally mounted at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, and later published in the catalogue, Hospice: A Photographic Inquiry, he focuses on the death of his father.

Frank Gonzalez-Crussi, M.D., is Professor of Pathology at Northwestern University Medical School (emeritus) and Head of Laboratories at Children's Memorial Hospital of Chicago. In addition to his extensive publication in medicine, Dr. Gonzalez-Crussi is the author of The Day of the Dead and Other Mortal Reflections, Notes of an Anatomist, Suspended Animation: Six Essays on the Preservation of Bodily Parts, and There is World Elsewhere: Autobiographical Pages.

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Jodi Halpern, who holds the Ph.D. in Philosophy as well as the M.D., is Assistant Professor of Medical Humanities in the UC Berkeley/UCSF Joint Medical Program. She has published numerous articles in the field of clinical ethics and is the author of Beyond Detached Concern: Empathy and Respect for Patient Autonomy in Medicine.

Gary Laderman, Ph.D., Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion at Emory University, is a historian of American culture and religion. His first book, entitled The Sacred Remains: American Attitudes Toward Death, 1799-1883 was published in 1996; he has recently completed his second book, Death in Modern America: A Cultural History of the Funeral Home.

Guy Micco, M.D., Clinical Professor of Medicine in the UC Berkeley/UCSF Joint Medical Program, says that he has been interested in the problem(s) of death for "as long as [he]can remember." A primary care physician in Berkeley, Dr. Micco serves as Chair of the very active Ethics Committee at Berkeley's Alta Bates Hospital. He is also Director of the Center for Medicine, the Humanities, and Law, recently organized on the Berkeley campus.

Lawrence Schneiderman, M.D., is a Professor in the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine and the Department of Medicine at the School of Medicine, UC San Diego. Dr. Schneiderman is a founding member of the San Diego Bioethics Group, and his many publications in that area have focused on debates over futility issues at the end of life, the role of the family physician in end-of-life care, decision-making about medical care with critically ill patients, and the impact of pediatric ethics consultations on patients, family, social workers, and physicians.

Oncologist Dr. Debasish Tripathy is Associate Clinical Professor of Medicine at the Mount Zion Breast Care Center, UCSF. The author of many scientific papers, Dr. Tripathy is a contributing editor to Breast Diseases: A Year Book Quarterly. He also serves on numerous civic and community boards concerned with issues around breast cancer.

Michael Witmore, Assistant Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University, earned his Ph.D. in Rhetoric at Berkeley and is completing his book, Culture of Accidents: Unexpected Knowledges in Early Modern England (forthcoming from Stanford University Press).Ê

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