Modern Death Quotes

“Doctors experience death more than any other professionals do—more than firefighters, policemen, or soldiers—yet we always think about death as a very concrete construct. It’s a box on a checklist, a red bar on a chart, or an outcome in a clinical trial. Death is secular, sterile, and singular—and, unlike many other things in medicine, incredibly binary. So it was interesting to think of death more as a concept and a process than as a fact and an endpoint.”
― Haider Warraich, Modern Death: How Medicine Changed the End of Life

“We have delayed death but have also made getting there more difficult.”
― Haider Warraich, Modern Death: How Medicine Changed the End of Life

“The loneliness of death creates an uncrossable bridge between us and everyone and everything else. Much of what we achieve in our lives is an attempt to offset the sheer terror that the existential loneliness of dying arouses when the cover of meaning is lifted. The chief defense we erect against nothingness is family, and up until just before the end, it holds up quite well.”
― Haider Warraich, Modern Death: How Medicine Changed the End of Life

“While we humans aspire to immortality, to a cell, immortality is the worst fate possible.”
― Haider Warraich, Modern Death: How Medicine Changed the End of Life

“In fact, only about three hundred miles separates Fairfax, Virginia, and McDowell, West Virginia, the counties with the longest (eighty-two years) and the shortest (sixty-four years) life expectancies for men in the United States.”
― Haider Warraich, Modern Death: How Medicine Changed the End of Life

“This reduction has been so dramatic that if we were to completely eliminate all deaths in people less than fifty years of age at this point—which accounts for about 12 percent of all deaths in the United States—the average life expectancy would increase by only another 3.5 years.37”
― Haider Warraich, Modern Death: How Medicine Changed the End of Life

“Thus, much to the chagrin of detractors in his native France, Carrel was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1912, the first to originate from the United States.”
― Haider Warraich, Modern Death: How Medicine Changed the End of Life

“After the local surgeons’ sutures failed to hold together the president’s severed blood vessels, Carrel’s passion for sewing blood vessels was born and he engaged one of Lyon’s most deft embroiderers, Madame Leroudier, to teach him the art of suturing.”
― Haider Warraich, Modern Death: How Medicine Changed the End of Life

“TP53 initiates apoptosis whenever it detects cell damage in normal cells, releasing agents to do its bidding called Puma, Noxa, and Bax, among others.”
― Haider Warraich, Modern Death: How Medicine Changed the End of Life

“cope with illness is by giving their life, their very”
― Haider Warraich, Modern Death: How Medicine Changed the End of Life