Spirit Ambulance

"The Spirit Ambulance is a journey into decision-making at the end of life in Thailand, where families attempt to craft good deaths for their elders in the face of clashing ethical frameworks, from a rapidly developing universal medical system, to national and global human-rights politics, to contemporary movements in Buddhist metaphysics. Stonington's gripping ethnography documents how Thai families attempt to pay back a "debt of life" to their elders through intensive medical care, followed by a medically-assisted rush from the hospital to home to ensure a spiritually advantageous last breath. The result is a powerful exploration of the nature of death and the complexities arising from the globalization of biomedical expertise and ethics around the world"—

Audience
adult
Length
medium · 208 pages

Click a tag to see books like this one that share it. Point at it (on a phone, tap it) for less of it instead.

Read it? Sign in to help tag it.

Liked Spirit Ambulance? Here’s where I’d start.

These suit anyone who liked Spirit Ambulance. Sign in and mark a few books for picks shaped around your own taste.

  1. Judgment Unto Truth: Witnessing the Armenian Genocide Shares medical ethics, medical care
  2. Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven but Nobody Wants to Die Shares medical ethics, medical care, death
  3. False hopes Shares medical ethics, medical care
  4. Dissenting Diagnosis Shares medical ethics, medical care

“If you want more of the same (sociology about buddhism), start with these.”

  1. Buddhism, ethics, and society
  2. The Making of Buddhist Modernism
  3. Buddhism in World Cultures
  4. Magic Dance: The Display of the Self-Nature of the Five Wisdom Dakinis

“If it was the older people that hooked you, try one of these.”

  1. Nursing Homes & Assisted Living Facilities
  2. Ethics in an aging society
  3. Bioethics
  4. The New Love and Sex After 60

“These start from a similar idea, even if they go somewhere else with it.”

  1. Improvising Medicine: An African Oncology Ward in an Emerging Cancer Epidemic
  2. Multi-Religious Perspectives on a Global Ethic
  3. A Superpower Transformed: The Remaking of American Foreign Relations in the 1970s
  4. The Good Doctor: A Father, a Son, and the Evolution of Medical Ethics