Intended for healthcare professionals

Spring Books

The Truth in the Light

BMJ 1995; 310 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.310.6988.1211 (Published 06 May 1995) Cite this as: BMJ 1995;310:1211
  1. Nigel Eastman

    Peter Fenwick, Elizabeth Fenwick Headline, pounds sterling16.99, pp 278 ISBN 0 7472 1186 8

    More than one million Americans near to death have “seen the light.” Peter Fenwick, a neurophysiologist and psychiatrist, and his wife, a writer, would emphasise—having conducted a British inquiry into some 300 “near death experiences”—that this phenomenon has little to do with religious conversion (although their sample looks significantly more religious than the general population, there was no evidence that near death experiences resulted in more than reinforcing of beliefs in God or an afterlife). Rather, seeing the light is one of a group of apparently commonly linked phenomena which include travelling down a dark tunnel, an out of body experience, a profound sense of peace, a vision of “paradise” (commonly seen as a vivid pastoral scene, sometimes with musical accompaniment), meeting …

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