
Lydia Dugdale
Columbia University
Collaborating Network
Affiliations
Professor of Medicine and Director, Columbia Center for Clinical Medical Ethics
Associate Director of Clinical Ethics, NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons
Biography
Dugdale also serves as Associate Director of Clinical Ethics at New York Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Irvine Medical Center. A practicing internist, Dugdale moved to Columbia in 2019 from Yale University, where she previously served as Associate Director of the Program for Biomedical Ethics and founding Co-Director of the Yale Program on Medicine, Spirituality, and Religion. Dugdale’s scholarship focuses on end-of-life issues, medical ethics, 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. She obtained her medical degree from the University of Chicago and completed her internship and residency at Yale-New Haven Hospital. She studied for her Master of Arts in Religion (ethics concentration) at Yale Divinity School.
Research Focus
- My book The Lost Art of Dying will be published with HarperCollins in July 2020. It aspires to help all people prepare well for death. Living well is requisite for dying well.
- I am analyzing ethics consultations that my New York City hospital received during the COVID-19 pandemic.
GFI Writings
Lydia Dugdale
Columbia University
We Can Flourish in Adversity, Sickness and Dying
This brief describes well how medicine has gone astray: "experts in means but amateurs in ends.” We doctors have come to focus far too much on patients feeling well, while ignoring both society’s responsibility in ameliorating adverse circumstances (see Bradley & Taylor’s The American Healt…
Lydia Dugdale
Columbia University
Modern Medicine May Sideline Justice
I am struck that the modern practice of medicine often challenges Wolterstorff’s treatment of justice (“rendering to each what is his or her right, or due”) in two key ways. First, the regnant principle in medicine is respect for autonomy, which means that treatment for patients often becomes mere w…