Letter to a Young Female Physician: Notes from a Medical Life

Because the brain mediates our experience of the world, any neurosurgical problem forces a patient and family, ideally with a doctor as a guide, to answer this question: What makes life meaningful enough to go on living?

But it would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.

The bigger problem, though, is that all these hoops made it much more likely that I would just give up or fail to follow through. At times I did. When I later asked Jack Cochran, the former executive director of the Permanente Federation, what happens to patients who don’t have the energy or the means to persevere in connecting their disconnected d

Nuland was a renowned surgeon-philosopher whose seminal book about mortality, How We Die, had come out when I was in high school but made it into my hands only in medical school. Few books I had read so directly and wholly