One Life, Many Deaths
Subtitle: a Surgeon's Stories
Publisher: Meredith Winter Press
Published: 2014
Place of publication: Cambridge, Mass
Language: eng
Number of pages: 384
ISBN-13: 9780692269367
Subjects: Physicians; Medicine; Medicine in Literature; Anecdotes; Personal Narratives as Topic
Description: As the path of his life unfolds, from a farm in the hills of Eastern Kentucky to the pinnacles of academic medicine, a surgeon's childhood panic about death is gradually transformed into a mature peace with mortality. Not only is his encounters with patients - from a gypsy patriarch to a homeless pauper - but also near-death experiences, premonitions, and other psychic phenomena, contributed to a growing sense of wonder, mystery, sometimes beauty, and above all serenity in the face of an inescapable human experience, death. The latter chapters, written after the author developed Parkinson's disease, describe how this physician, scientist, administrator, and increasingly spiritual seeker plans to live a full and happy life, and have a "good death" when the time comes.