33 Meditations on Death: Notes from the Wrong End of Medicine

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Anything we prepare for is so much easier to handle than becoming overwhelmed due to our lack of tools to sort things out clearly. I’ve recommended this book to so many and my parents have read this as a result (and also loved it)! My cynical side thinks it’s because keeping an old patient alive generates way more money for the medical community.

I am still working, albeit part time, as a consultant geriatrician and stroke physician on the south coast of England. It is a very thought-provoking, and often moving book, that reveals how modern medicine can sometimes prolong suffering for both the patient and the family. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. A mixture of reminiscences drawn from the author's family life and a long medical career and reflections on how to deal with death and dying. It’s fantastic - every chapter left me reflecting on my own life, what I would like for the people I love and what I hope my children will experience.I am interested in how modern medicine seems to have lost its way especially with excessive investigation and treatment of the very frail and elderly close to the end of their natural lives.

David Jarrett has been a doctor for forty years, thirty of which as an NHS consultant in geriatric and stroke medicine.You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. He marries the importance of keeping ourselves useful with the necessity not to take ourselves too seriously. This unusual and important book is a series of reflections on death in all its forms: the science of it, the medicine, the tragedy and the comedy. This is a big omission and the book would have been far more rounded had it touched upon this aspect of ageing and dying.