Sunita Puri

That Good Night: On Dignity, Suffering, and the Role of Medicine in Life's Eleventh Hour

~Part of the End-of-Life Conversations Series~
~Co-presented with the Mesa Refuge and Point Reyes Books~

Join TNS Host Steve Heilig in conversation with physician, author, and medical ethicist Sunita Puri in the next in our End-of-Life Conversations series. In her new book, That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour, she weaves evocative stories of her family and the patients she cares for in a meditation on impermanence and the role of medicine in helping us to live and die well.

Kirkus Reviews magazine calls her book, “A profound meditation on a problem many of us will face; worthy of being mentioned in the same breath as Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal.” 

Sunita Puri, MD

Sunita Puri is the medical director of the Palliative Medicine and Supportive Care Service at the Keck Hospital and Norris Cancer Center of the University of Southern California, where she also serves as chair of the Ethics Committee. She graduated from Yale University with a B.A. in Anthropology and studied Modern History at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. She completed medical school and residency training in Internal Medicine at the University of California San Francisco, and fellowship training in Hospice and Palliative Medicine at Stanford University.

Sunita is the recipient of writing residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Ucross Foundation, and the Mesa Refuge. She was a finalist for the PEN Emerging Voices Fellowship in 2015. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and JAMA – Internal Medicine. In 2018, she received the Etz Chaim Tree of Life Award from the USC Keck 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.