Dth

“But the fact is, death is not a confrontation. It is simply an event in the sequence of nature’s ongoing rhythms. Not death but disease is the real enemy, disease the malign force that requires confrontation. Death is the surcease that comes when the exhausting battle has been lost. Even the confrontation with disease should be approached with the realization that many of the sicknesses of our species are simply conveyances for the inexorable journey by which each of us is returned to the same state of physical, and perhaps spiritual, nonexistence from which we emerged at conception. Every triumph over some major pathology, no matter how ringing the victory, is only a reprieve from the inevitable end”

“Like so many other medical terms, ischemia is a word with an interesting history and colorful associations. It will recur again and again in the telling of the stories in this long narrative of death, because it is so ubiquitous—and so insidious—a driving force toward the quenching of life’s energies. Though starvation of the heart may offer the most dramatic example of its lurking dangers, the process of choking off oxygen and nutrition is the common denominator in a wide variety of mortal illnesses.”

“Long before we knew about the lurking perils of cholesterol, cigarettes, diabetes, and hypertension, the medical world was beginning to recognize specific characteristics in those persons who seemed destined for cardiac death. William Osler, the author of America’s first great textbook of medicine in 1892, might have been describing James McCarty when he wrote, “It is not the delicate neurotic person who is prone to angina, but the robust, the vigorous in mind and body, the keen and ambitious man, the indicator of whose engines is always at ‘full speed ahead.’ “By their speedometers shall ye know them.”