Has Modern Medicine Made Dying Harder Than Ever?
Hospitals Have Gotten Better at Keeping Us Alive, But That Also Means Thornier Questions at the End of Life
In his 2010 New Yorker essay “Letting Go,” surgeon Atul Gawande stops by the intensive care unit at his hospital and describes the sad state of its patients at the very end of their lives. While two out of 10 patients there are likely to make it out of the hospital, the others, he says, are more like an 80-year-old woman with irreversible congestive heart failure, “who was in the ICU for the second time in three weeks, drugged to oblivion and tubed in most natural orifices and a few …
