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

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But my observation is that iliving to an old age - a slow death - is as bad as the author describes. I am still working, albeit part time, as a consultant geriatrician and stroke physician on the south coast of England. It presents a cogent argument for an alternative approach to the end of life from the one that has seen us sacrifice quality of years for quantity.

Anything we prepare for is so much easier to handle than becoming overwhelmed due to our lack of tools to sort things out clearly. We are all going to die, at some stage, and decisions we make will inform our declining years - from 25 years on.No one wants to live long enough to sit incapacitated in a wheelchair in the corridor of a hospital or nursing home.

Jarrett explains how we can ensure that our last years are comfortable and not a burden to us, the health care system and, most importantly, our loved ones. Bursting with empathy, common sense and humour, would that we could all be so fortunate as to have the author at our bedside when the time comes.If a doctor can perform an abortion or transgender operation I don’t understand why a patient can’t request an end of life assist. He is a clinician, teacher, examiner and former medical manager with extensive experience of frailty, death and dying and the modern world’s failure to confront the realities. It is immensely readable and is both funny and poignant even though it covers very difficult and often avoided subjects; namely the fact that we all die, that old age can be grim and that death is not always the worst outcome. David Jarrett’s 33 Meditations, the fruit of forty years of professional experience with people at the end of their lives, is not only timely and important, but hugely enjoyable.

This is reflected less in his observations - which are more evenhanded - than in his sweeping asides and unfortunately these do intrude given the subject matter of what is otherwise a thoughtful and interesting book about dying. David Jarrett has been a doctor for forty years, thirty of which as an NHS consultant in geriatric and stroke medicine. Brilliant - a grimly humourous yet humane account of the realities of growing old in the modern age. Profound, provocative, strangely funny and astonishingly compelling, it is an impassioned plea that we start talking frankly and openly about death.

You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. 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. This is a big omission and the book would have been far more rounded had it touched upon this aspect of ageing and dying. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.

Like many lapsed Catholics the author is sometimes guilty of imagining that a Roman Catholic understanding of how to respond to death and what religion means is the only valid (but wrong) way of being religious. Old age and the end of life are things that we need to prepare for and discuss with our family members.It is striking how the candour of our public discourse fails when we get on to the subject of death, a significant and puzzling failure for it is the fate we all share. David Jarrett's 33 Meditations, the fruit of forty years of professional experience with people at the end of their lives, is not only timely and important, but hugely enjoyable. How else will my caregivers (when I'm old and gaga) know I want a glass of Aussie Chardonnay at 7pm every evening. This wonderfully enlightening book by a doctor who cares for the dying is a plea for all of us to consider now what a good death should look like and what we’d want for ourselves. Jarrett has cared for elderly patients for many years and after reading this book, one feels assured of his empathy and compassion towards all his patients.