The job of any doctor, Bludau later told me, is to support quality of life, by which he meant two things: as much freedom from the ravages of disease… - Atul Gawande

I learned about a lot of things in medical school, but mortality wasn’t one of them. Although I was given a dry, leathery corpse to dissect in my first term, that was solely a way to learn about human anatomy. Our textbooks had almost nothing on aging or frailty or dying. How the process unfolds, how people experience the end of their lives, and how it affects those around them seemed beside the point. The way we saw it, and the way our professors saw it, the purpose of medical schooling was to teach how to save lives, not how to tend to their demise.

You do not imagine that a mere matter of etiquette could foil you. But the social dimension turns out to be as essential as the scientific — matters of how casual you should be, how formal, how reticent, how forthright. Also: how apologetic, how self-confident, how money-minded.

Courage, Laches responds, “is a certain endurance of the soul.