From How We Die, Sherwin Nuland
“Every life is different from an thaty has gone before it, and so is every death. The uniqueness of each of us extends even to the way we die. Everyone of death’s diverse appearances is as distinctive as that singular face we each show the world during the days of our life. Every man will yield up the ghost in a manner that the heavens have never known before; every woman will go her final way in her own way” (3).
“Poets, essayist, chronicles, wags, and wise men write often about death but have rarely seen it. Physicians and nurses, who see it often, rarely write about it. Most people see it once or twice in a lifetime, in situations where they are too entangled in its emotional significance to retain dependable memories. Survivors of mass destruction quickly develop such powerful psychological defense against the horror of what they have seen that nightmarish images distort the actual events to which they have been witness. There are few reliable accounts of the ways in which we die.
An entire mythology has grown up around the process of dying. Like most mythologies, it is based on the inborn psychologicall need that all humankind shares. The mythologies of death are meant to combat fear on the one hand and its opposite–wishes–on the others. They are meant to serves us by disarming our terror about what the reality may be” (8).
Death and art- 9
Death and heart- 20
“It becomes the doctor’s job to identify the instigating cause of sickness by tracing back along the sequence until he has found the ultimate culprit–microbial or hormonal, chemical or mechanical, genetic or environmental, malignant or benign, congenital or newly acquired. The investigation id done by following the clues left in the identifiable damage done to the body by the perpetrator. The crime is thus reconstructed and a treatment plan devised that rids the patient of the influence of the instigator or disease. In a sense then, every doctor is a patholphysiologist, an investigator who identities the disease by tracing the origin of its symptoms. That having been done, appropriate therapy can be chosen” (90).
