Sublime

THE STORY OF aging is the story of our parts.

the physician’s duty is not to stave off death or return patients to their old lives, but to take into our arms a patient and family whose lives have disintegrated and work until they can stand back up and face, and make sense of, their own existence.

Or as the nurse to the Union dead writes: Stand cool and composed before a million universes

But sometime over the last several decades—and it is only over the last several decades—science has filled in enough knowledge to make ineptitude as much our struggle as ignorance.

“It is the brain, not the heart or lungs, that is the critical organ,” said the esteemed neurologist Roger Bannister,

They recognized, as does every intern, that these are not God-given gifts, but can only be acquired by diligent practice and endless striving toward the ultimately unattainable goal of perfection. A director of surgical training in one of our great university hospitals would be hard put to improve on the counsel offered by Hippocrates two and a hal

THE THREE DEATHS

The true doctor would no longer be an intermediary with the gods but the bedside friend of the sick.