Sunita Puri

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That Good Night by Sunita Puri

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August 5, 2023

The Hidden Harms of CPR

Winter 2023

The Gift

March 29, 2023

What Does It Mean to Be Ready to Die?

May 21, 2022

My Patient Didn’t Die From Covid. He Died Because of It.

February 23, 2022

We Must Learn to Look at Grief, Even When We Want to Run Away

Nov 14, 2019 | Video

A Mini Documentary by the Guardian about Dr. Puri and Palliative Medicine

February 9, 2021 | Audio

Terrible, Thanks For Asking

2019 | Video

Dr. Puri’s talk on Language and Medicine

March 6, 2019 | Video

Interview with Amanpour & Co

March 27, 2020 | Article

It’s Time to Talk About Death

“To say that the practice of palliative care comes to vivid life in Sunita Puri’s pages may seem like a bad choice of words. But her memoir about tending to seriously, often incurably, sick people pulls off that feat. Puri the doctor knows that masterful control isn’t the point. For Puri the writer, her prose proves that it is.”
—The Atlantic

“A profound exploration of what it means for all of us to live—and to die—with dignity and purpose.”
—People (Book of the Week) 

“Puri writes about how palliative care specialists are working to change medicine from within—teaching other doctors how to talk to patients about their hopes and fears, not just their disease and treatment.”
—NPR

“It will save your life when you need to learn to accept death.”
—The Asian Age

That Good Night will inspire you to recognize and respond to suffering with compassion. Whether caring for patients on your own or with the support of a palliative care team, fluency in the language of suffering will help you preserve compassion in medicine.”
—Oncology Times

“Sunita Puri’s luminous, lyrical memoir is a literary introduction to the work of palliative care…Her stories, combined with her sense that we’re guided by a benevolent force beyond comprehension, point toward love’s power and life’s fragility.”
—The Christian Century

“An impressive debut . . . Puri does the hard work of bringing humanity to medicine. Her commitment to normalizing conversations about death, and telling stories about what quality-of-life and dying-with-dignity can mean for patients in their last moments, makes this book a must-read for healthcare professionals everywhere.”
—India Today

Dr. Sunita Puri is the Program Director of the Hospice and Palliative Medicine Fellowship at the UMass Chan School of Medicine, where she is also an associate professor of clinical medicine. A graduate of Yale University, she completed medical school and residency training in internal medicine at the University of California San Francisco followed by fellowship training in palliative medicine at Stanford. She is the author of That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour, a critically acclaimed literary memoir examining her journey to the practice of palliative medicine, and her quest to help patients and families redefine what it means to live and die well in the face of serious illness. She is the recipient of a Rhodes Scholarship and a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans. Her writing and book have been featured in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Slate, JAMA, the Atlantic, NPR, India Today, the Asian Age, the Oncology Times, and, forthcoming, the New Yorker.
In 2019, the Guardian made a mini-documentary of her work in palliative medicine which has been viewed nearly 3 million times. She has been interviewed on the PBS Cristian Amanpour show, at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, ZDogg MD’s show, and numerous podcasts.  In 2018, she was awarded the Etz Chaim Tree of Life Award from the USC School of Medicine, awarded annually to a member of the faculty who, in the eyes of the campus community, models and provides humanistic and compassionate care. She has taught medical memoir and literary nonfiction to medical students and residents, and has delivered talks about palliative medicine, the centrality of narrative and storytelling in medicine, and physician well-being in forums around the world.
Sunita is available for speaking engagements and her speaking agent is Alysyn Reinhardt of the Penguin/Random House Speakers’ Bureau. She can be reached at areinhardt@penguinrandomhouse.com

About the Book
Interweaving evocative stories of Puri’s family and the patients she cares for, That Good Night is a stunning meditation on impermanence and the role of medicine in helping us to live and die well, arming readers with information that will transform how we communicate with our doctors about what matters most to us.