![]() Chen, a transplant surgeon, finds that modern medical training sometimes leads to an overly clinical approach to death, leaving patients and families feeling dehumanized as lives draw to a close. It has become required reading for many medical students, and, like Gawande’s Being Mortal, it is about how doctors cope with death. This book was recommended by Rob’s daughter, Bobbi Meyer, who was starting medical school as the pandemic took hold. Chen, Final Exam: A Surgeon’s Reflections on Mortality Rob considers this essential reading for every student entering medical school. Gawande calls for a rethinking of how doctors approach end of life. Medicine seeks to be humane but often falls short. Gawande, a surgeon at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a staff writer at The New Yorker, explains-with careful reporting and vivid anecdotes-how modern medicine has failed to modernize the way it approaches the inevitable, sometimes adding unnecessary misery to a patient’s final days and weeks. This is one, possibly the most heartbreaking book you will ever read, that we talked about constantly as we worked on our own book.Ītul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the EndĪll doctors deal with death, but young physicians starting out during the pandemic experienced death in numbers that were traumatizing. As sad as this book is, what comes through in the end is that Kalanithi’s life was filled with exploration, hope, and love. Kalanithi’s skill with words is put to tragic but moving use in this book, as he chronicles his battle with metastatic lung cancer, a battle he will not survive. When Paul Kalanithi was a young man, he contemplated a literary life, before turning toward neurosurgery, where, he believed, he could do something even deeper: understand the nature of thought. This was personally reinforced to me as I underwent my own unexpected cancer battle during the writing of Every Minute Is a Day. The history of the affliction, and humanity’s attempts to understand, fight, and cure it, are epic, inspiring, and grandiose. Siddhartha Mukherjee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2011 history of cancer was a book I first read just after it came out, when a relative of mine was struggling with the disease. Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer But when COVID hit, Rob felt he needed to vent, to talk about his experience, to document it. I can attest that Gawande’s book isn’t just for doctors. Rob teaches young doctors-in-training at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and he often assigns Atul Gawande’s brilliant Being Mortal, perhaps the greatest modern meditation on life and death from a physician’s perspective. We were both astonished by When Breath Becomes Air, neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi’s moving story of his own death by metastatic cancer. But one other thing we share is a love of reading medical memoirs, procedurals, and other nonfiction stories of triumph and tragedy in hospitals, operating rooms, and research facilities. Although, after more than two decades as a doctor in one of the country’s busiest emergency rooms, the idea has been suggested to him several times. My obsessions often occupy the strange corners, not center stage. I wrote about a friend who vanished, leaving a wife and child behind, only to resurface with an entirely new identity as a legendary hiker on the Appalachian Trail. I’ve written about a man who ran around the world, partially duplicating his feat by running halfway across Australia myself. Writing was something I never knew my father aspired to until, after he died, I found notebooks full of poetry hidden amidst his medical textbooks and financial records.Īs a nonfiction writer, my choice of subject has always been the unusual, the off-center: I wrote a book about bananas and another about birds and bird watching. While studying to become an emergency room doctor, Rob was mentored by my late father, while I went on a different path, becoming a writer. A shared history and love of baseball are what have kept us close. My cousin Rob Meyer and I have known each other all our lives. ![]()
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