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Jan 21, 2007
"When you do not realize that you are one with the river, or one with the universe, you have fear. Whether it is separated into drops or not, water is water. Our life and death are the same thing. When we realize this fact, we have no fear of death anymore." --Shunryu Suzuki
A Surgeon's Reflections on Mortality
Surgeon Pauline Chen maintains that doctors are as much at a loss as the rest of us when it comes to confronting death. Chen writes about "the final exam" -- the emotional challenges posed by terminal illnesses in the medical world. Death, she says, asks unanswerable questions. Perhaps most vexingly, it threatens to crack the hard professional shell of detachment that medical training puts in place. Dr. Chen, a surgeon specializing in liver transplants, is her own patient in "Final Exam", a series of thoughtful, moving essays on the relationship between modern medical practice and the emotive events surrounding death. This New York Times review takes a closer look at the work of a doctor open to confronting her own fears and doubts, and willing to prepare her patients for the final exam.
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