Being Mortal: Medicine And What Matters In The End Quotes
"Although I was given a dry, leathery corpse to dissect in my first term, that was solely a way to learn about human anatomy."
"How the process unfolds, how people experience the end of their lives, and how it affects those around them seemed beside the point."
"The purpose of medical schooling was to teach how to save lives, not how to tend to their demise."
"What tormented Ivan Ilyich most was the deception, the lie, that he was not dying but was simply ill."
"No one pitied him as he wished to be pitied."
"We were confident that in such a situation we would act compassionately."
"We had no difficulty explaining the specific dangers of various treatment options, but we never really touched on the reality of his disease."
"Modern scientific capability has profoundly altered the course of human life."
"Our reluctance to honestly examine the experience of aging and dying has increased the harm we inflict on people."
"You don’t have to spend much time with the elderly or those with terminal illness to see how often medicine fails the people it is supposed to help."
"Life for older people can be better than it is today."
"The shock to me therefore was seeing medicine not pull people through."
"I feel as if a part of my body is missing. I feel as if I have been dismembered."
"It means something when you can move in and see all your things in their own places—your own silver in your kitchen drawer."
"This looks like a medical problem. Let’s put these people in the hospital. Maybe the doctors can figure something out."
"We want autonomy for ourselves and safety for those we love."
"At eighty, I have the right to make up my mind and do what I want to do."
"The various enforced activities are brought together into a single plan purportedly designed to fulfill the official aims of the institution."
"You’d think people would have rebelled. You’d think we would have burned the nursing homes to the ground."
"Assisted living most often became a mere layover on the way from independent living to a nursing home."
"The aim, he said, was to attack what he termed the Three Plagues of nursing home existence: boredom, loneliness, and helplessness."
"We’re going to work through this. It’s going to be hard, yes. But we’ll figure it out."
"Culture is the sum total of shared habits and expectations."
"The value of autonomy lies in the scheme of responsibility it creates: autonomy makes each of us responsible for shaping his own life."
"We all require devotion to something more than ourselves for our lives to be endurable."
"The important thing was that, in ascribing value to the cause and seeing it as worth making sacrifices for, we give our lives meaning."
"The only way death is not meaningless is to see yourself as part of something greater: a family, a community, a society."
"When there is no way of knowing exactly how long our skeins will run—and when we imagine ourselves to have much more time than we do—our every impulse is to fight."
"But rarely is there nothing more that doctors can do."
"The fact that we may be shortening or worsening the time we have left hardly seems to register."
"We imagine that we can wait until the doctors tell us that there is nothing more they can do."
"The lesson seems almost Zen: you live longer only when you stop trying to live longer."
"The explanation would seem to strain credibility, but evidence for it has grown in recent years."
"We are increasingly the generals who march the soldiers onward, saying all the while, 'You let me know when you want to stop.'"
"People die only once. They have no experience to draw on."
"Our responsibility, in medicine, is to deal with human beings as they are."
"Every passing day without a fall allowed his back and neck spasms to reduce, his pain to become better controlled, and his strength to increase."
"We witnessed for ourselves the consequences of living for the best possible day today instead of sacrificing time now for time later."
"Little is more gratifying than actually being wanted back in your hometown."
"He found that in the narrow space of possibility that his awful tumor had left for him there was still room to live."
"Courage, Laches responds, ‘is a certain endurance of the soul.’"
"The first is the courage to confront the reality of mortality—the courage to seek out the truth of what is to be feared and what is to be hoped."
"The challenge, I’ve come to see, is more fundamental than that. One has to decide whether one’s fears or one’s hopes are what should matter most."
"I realized, with shame, that I’d reverted to being Dr. Informative—here are the facts and figures; what do you want to do?"
"A seemingly happy life may be empty. A seemingly difficult life may be devoted to a great cause."