Stephanie Nwagwu’s Reviews > Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End > Status Update

If to be human is to be limited, then the role of caring professions…ought to be aiding people in their struggle with those limits. Sometimes we can offer a cure, sometimes only as salve…But whatever we can offer, our interventions… are justified only if they serve the larger aims of a person‘s life. When we forget that, the suffering we inflict can be barbaric. When we remember, the good can be breathtaking.

“when a country’s economy develops…the greater resources make medical capabilities more wildly available. People turn to healthcare systems when they are ill at the end of life, they often die in the hospital instead of the home… as a country’s income climbs to the highest levels, people have the means to be concerned about the quality of their lives… and death at home actually rise again”

“We’ve created a multi trillion dollar edifice for dispensing the medical equivalent of lottery tickets— and have only the rudiments of a system to prepare patients for the near certainty that those tickets will not win. Hope is not a plan, but hope is our plan.”

“The battle of being mortal is the battle to maintain the integrity of one’s life - to avoid becoming so diminished or dissipated or subjugated that who you are becomes disconnected from who you were or who you want to be.”