Cressida Connolly

Care for the dying needs more imagination – and less hospitalisation

A review of Being Mortal: Illness, Medicine and What Matters in the End. This is that rare thing: a truly important book

issue 01 November 2014

‘To die of age is a rare, singular and extra-ordinary death’, wrote Montaigne, ‘and so much less natural than others: it is the last and extremest form of dying.’ Not any more. Thanks to the marvels of modern medicine, we are limping and stumbling and mumbling and forgetting our way into the grave at greater ages than ever before.

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