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Notes from Being Mortal by Atul Gawande
“What tormented Ivan Ilyich most,” Tolstoy writes, “was the deception, the lie, which for some reason they all accepted, that he was not dying but was simply ill, and he only need keep quiet and undergo a treatment and then something very good would result.
We did little better than Ivan Ilyich’s primitive nineteenth-century doctors—worse, actually, given the new forms of physical torture we’d inflicted on our patient.