The Way We Die Now


Perhaps the first and most important thing to say about this book is that it’s a joy to read. I started it on a flight from Dhaka to Mexico City when I was exhausted, but quickly I was deeply engaged and read it for the last two hours of the flight. When I was eating alone I chose it rather than my E M Forster novel. “But isn’t it depressing?” asked a friend. “Not at all,” I answered, “it’s a joy.” Most books a medical journal sends you to review may be packed with wisdom, but they are a labour not a joy to read. (I might add, as a committed Kindle reader, that the book is also physically beautiful, even including a ribbon as a bookmark, a splendidly old fashioned delight.)

Seamus O’Mahony has written the book using his own extensive experience of people dying in acute hospitals and the experiences of friends and family, but the best parts of the book may be his critical accounts of thinkers—like Phillipe Ariès and Ivan Illich—who have gone before and his witty analysis of the deaths of various celebrities, including Susan Sontag and Christopher Hitchens, both sceptics who fought death beyond what was sensible.

I hope that when I die that I have a doctor like O’Mahony to look after me, a doctor who is deeply conscious of the many failings of medicine and his own fragility. He tries all he can to avoid The Lie, giving the false impression that a dying person is not dying, and he calls together patient, relatives, and nurses to have the Difficult Conversation, the discussion when he tells patients that they are going to die.....Read more

 

Source web page:blogs.bmj.com


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