Peter Brook Cadogan Fenwick: neuropsychiatrist who explored the limits of human consciousness and became an expert on near death experiences

Throughout his career, neuropsychiatrist Peter Fenwick sought explanations for human experiences and consciousness that went beyond conventional models of brain function. He became a leading authority on the phenomenon of near death experiences (NDEs), where people hovering between life and death report a sensation of leaving their body.

He published more than 300 scientific papers on subjects including epilepsy, sleep, the nature of consciousness, end-of-life experiences, and NDEs. With his wife, Elizabeth, he co-authored six books. He also featured on numerous radio and television programmes, including the 2003 BBC documentary The Day I Died, in which he and Sam Parnia, a resuscitation expert, discussed their belief that the mind can be independent of the brain.

Fenwick’s interest in NDEs was sparked by Raymond Moody’s 1975 book Life after Life. It recounted the experiences of 150 people who had had NDEs and reported sensations of leaving their body, floating towards a tunnel, seeing a bright light, or seeing their life flash before their eyes.

A year after Fenwick read Moody’s book, a long term patient walked into his epilepsy clinic at St Thomas’s Hospital and described how he had had an NDE. During an operation to insert a cardiac catheter, the patient had left his body and observed what was going …