Being Mortal: Illness, Medicine and What Matters in the End (Wellcome Collection)

by Atul Gawande

You become a doctor for what you imagine to be the satisfaction of the work, and that turns out to be the satisfaction of competence.

For a clinician, therefore, nothing is more threatening to who you think you are than a patient with a problem you cannot solve.

The historical pattern is clear: as soon as people got the resources and opportunity to abandon that way of life, they were gone.

Modernization did not demote the elderly. It demoted the family.

Although the elderly population is growing rapidly, the number of certified geriatricians the medical profession has put in practice has actually fallen in the United States by 25 percent between 1996 and 2010.

The job of any doctor, Bludau later told me, is to support quality of life, by which he meant two things: as much freedom from the ravages of disease as possible and the retention of enough function for active engagement in the world.

When the prevailing fantasy is that we can be ageless, the geriatrician’s uncomfortable demand is that we accept we are not.

97 percent of medical students take no course in geriatrics,