ADDENDA


Book review When breath becomes air


By Paul Kalanithi Vintage, £8.99 paperback Review by Greg Dollman, medical adviser, MDDUS


Object obscura:


Pomander THIS eight-sectioned spherical pomander of gold and silver was used to carry fragrant scented petals and herbs with the aim of freshening the air and preventing disease. Some of the segments are inscribed with the name of the contents: ‘Rosen, Ruten, Moscat, Canel and Rosmarin’. Date unknown but probably 15th or 16th century.


Crossword 2


1 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 16 17 20


21 22


18 19 15


PAUL Kalanithi died from metastatic lung cancer, aged 37, and in this book, published posthumously, he asks: “What makes human life meaningful?” It is a deeply moving story of the boldness of the human spirit, limited by the frailty of our bodies. Life and death were concepts Paul encountered on a daily


basis as a doctor – and they had consumed his thoughts for years before he ventured into medicine. When his studies in literature and philosophy at Stanford and Cambridge failed to provide the answers he sought, he immersed himself in medicine. Then, only months away from completing his neurosurgery residency, Paul faced a different form of death: his own. It was in medicine that Paul


3 4 5 6 7 23 24


ACROSS 1


Instructed (7)


5 South Asian country (5) 8 Surroundings (11) 9 Everything (3) 10 The second number (3) 11 Cope (6) 14 Principles (6) 15 Territorial division (6) 17 Pay no regard to (6) 18 Organ of hearing (3) 20 Emulsion into which crudités are plunged (3)


22 Medical oath (11) 24 Voluminous (5) 25 Sets down in writing (7)


DOWN 1 Cure (5) 2 Pulmonary _______, terminal


25 end of the respiratory tree (8)


3 Location of post-WW2 trials (9) 4 Eating out (6) 5 Frozen water (3) 6 Robotic character in Star Trek TNG (4)


7 What patient-complainers seek (7)


12 Decorated with regular lines or shapes (9)


13 Like Logie-Baird or Alexander Graham Bell? (8)


14 “New” medical duty (7) 16 Hue (6) 19 Frameworks for storing items (5)


21 Parliamentary health complaints body (abbr.) (4)


23 Variety of lentil (3)


See answers online at: www.mddus.com/news/notice-board


22


found “the messiness and weight of real human life” that were lacking in literature, morality and the formal ethics of analytical philosophy. He also pondered religion as his cancer took hold. In the end, he concludes that “no system of thought can contain the fullness of human experience”. For Paul, life is a mixture of science and art, a personal journey that must be lived fully to be understood. Paul tells of life with his high-achieving family and his wife Lucy and his daughter Cady, born eight months before his death. His story is real, warts and all, rather than some abstract contemplation of what life should be. Lucy, in her epilogue, describes Paul’s cancer diagnosis as a nut cracker, which revealed the true interior of a facade hardened by life (and life as a doctor). Paul recalls his journey through medical school to his final


graduation, acknowledging his human failings – he remembers wishing a Cheyne-Stoking patient would die so that he could return to bed on a week-long set of on-call shifts, and rescuing a melting ice-cream sandwich from the warm resuscitation bay where a family congregated around their just-dead relative. This was real life (of a doctor with the best intentions), intermingled with death. After his diagnosis, Paul wryly accepts that he has been given the ultimate opportunity to better understand the particularities of death. He chose his neurosurgery career “in part, to pursue death: to grasp it, uncloak it, and see it eye-to-eye, unblinking.” In the epilogue, Lucy gives a raw and personal description of Paul’s final moments: “I asked him whether he needed more morphine, and he nodded yes, his eyes closed”. This is a very human story of life and death, which challenges


patients and doctors alike to consider the impact they have on each other. Beautifully written, the message is simple yet exceptionally powerful.


SUMMONS


PHOTOGRAPH: SCIENCE & SOCIETY


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24