Sublime

Nuland was a renowned surgeon-philosopher whose seminal book about mortality, How We Die, had come out when I was in high school but made it into my hands only in medical school. Few books I had read so directly and wholly

When there’s no place for the scalpel, words are the surgeon’s only tool.

Descriptions like Nuland’s convinced me that such things could be known only face-to-face.

Capacious

Our patients’ lives and identities may be in our hands, yet death always wins.

By 1932, the historian Henry E. Sigerist had noted that medicine’s systemizing impulses were “no longer concerned with man but with disease,” as Anderson and Mackay point out.