I learned about a lot of things in medical school, but mortality wasn’t one of them. Although I was given a dry, leathery corpse to dissect in my first term, that was solely a way to learn about human anatomy. Our textbooks had almost nothing on aging or frailty or dying. How the process unfolds, how people experience the end of their lives, and how it affects those around them seemed beside the point. The way we saw it, and the way our professors saw it, the purpose of medical schooling was to teach how to save lives, not to tend to their demise.
The one time I remember discussing mortality was during an hour we spent on The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Tolstoy’s classic novella. It was in a weekly seminar called Patient-Doctor—part of the school’s effort to make us more rounded and humane physicians.
While we knew how to sympathize, we weren’t at all certain we would know how to properly diagnose and treat. We didn’t imagine we needed to think about much else.
Then, as junior surgical interns - given the new forms of physical torture we'd inflicted on some of our dying patients. We did worse than Ivan Ilyich’s primitive 19th-century doctors. It is enough to make you wonder, who are the primitive ones?
This article was originally published on www.theatlantic.com. Read the complete article here.
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