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When Breath Becomes Air

My Rating:


  • Brave New World founded my nascent moral philosophy and became the subject of my college admissions essay, in which I argued that happiness was not the point of life.
  • If the unexamined life was not worth living, was the unlived life worth examining?
  • In our rare reflective moments, we were all silently apologizing to our cadavers, not because we sensed the transgression but because we did not.
  • Preemies, if they survived, apparently incurred high rates of brain hemorrhages and cerebral palsy. Then again, my older brother, Suman, had been born almost eight weeks premature, three decades earlier, and he was now a practicing neurologist.
  • How little do doctors understand the hells through which we put patients.
  • The reason doctors don’t give patients specific prognoses is not merely because they cannot. Certainly, if a patient’s expectations are way out of the bounds of probability—someone expecting to live to 130, say, or someone thinking his benign skin spots are signs of imminent death—doctors are entrusted to bring that person’s expectations into the realm of reasonable possibility. What patients seek is not scientific knowledge that doctors hide but existential authenticity each person must find on her own.

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