How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter
A Yale surgeon describes, organ system by organ system, what actually happens to the body in the most common causes of death — heart disease, stroke, old age, Alzheimer's, accident, murder and suicide, AIDS, and cancer — interleaving clinical explanation with cases from his own practice and his own family. Nuland's stated aim is to "demythologize the process of dying," and he argues that the peaceful, dignified death most people picture is rare.
Thirty years of medicine have run past this book. Its AIDS chapter was written before combination therapy arrived in 1996, which is why one reader scores it "four stars for the concept but one star for being significantly out of date with the implementation data." Staleness would matter less if the argument moved, but "he is verbose and highly repetitive, especially about pet concepts," and a reviewer who got through every page complains that "he needs to flog the dead horse a few thousand times." The register does not help: for one book club reader "the writing felt choppy and was over-laden with scientific jargon." Readers who want the same argument keep pointing at Gawande's Being Mortal, published twenty years later, instead.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
