Modern Death: How Medicine Changed the End of Life

Warraich, a physician, writer, and clinical researcher, thoughtfully investigates the often alarming realities of death in early 21st-century America. For many it will be a “drawn-out slow burn” from a chronic illness, and where that end occurs depends largely on race and economic status. As medicine improves, it has paradoxically made death “more harrowing and prolonged today than it has ever been before.” For Warraich, the person who more than any other “would come to define modern death” was Karen Ann Quinlan, whose coma triggered a fight over keeping her on life support—a contentious battle that ended with a 1976 New Jersey Supreme Court decision that momentously introduced “the patient and the family member into medical decision making.” Around the same time, brain death was defined in a way that has made many modern deaths protracted for the patient, uncertain for the medical team, and heart-wrenching for grieving families. Dying may now include a health-care proxy, a living will, and advance directives to accommodate the patient’s wishes for their own death. as Warraich eloquently explores the act of dying, he urges the public to talk more about it and pleads for “resuscitating many of the aspects of death that we have lost.” Agent: Don Fehr, Trident Media. (Feb.)