33 Meditations on Death: Notes from the Wrong End of Medicine

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Too much medicine and too little helping people and their families gain a realistic vision of old age and dying. It presents a cogent argument for an alternative approach to the end of life from the one that has seen us sacrifice quality of years for quantity.

This wonderfully enlightening book by a doctor who cares for the dying is a plea for all of us to consider now what a good death should look like and what we’d want for ourselves. Like many lapsed Catholics the author is sometimes guilty of imagining that a Roman Catholic understanding of how to respond to death and what religion means is the only valid (but wrong) way of being religious. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. This book was recommended and whilst I did find it interesting in parts, generally it's a tad sad and depressing ( as it would be given the subject matter) For me, the book lacked any spiritual depth. It is immensely readable and is both funny and poignant even though it covers very difficult and often avoided subjects; namely the fact that we all die, that old age can be grim and that death is not always the worst outcome.We all need to have conversation about what we want in the end and keep the conversation going with your family. He is a clinician, teacher, examiner and former medical manager with extensive experience of frailty, death and dying and the modern world’s failure to confront the realities.

It is a very thought-provoking, and often moving book, that reveals how modern medicine can sometimes prolong suffering for both the patient and the family. David Jarrett’s 33 Meditations, the fruit of forty years of professional experience with people at the end of their lives, is not only timely and important, but hugely enjoyable. It is striking how the candour of our public discourse fails when we get on to the subject of death, a significant and puzzling failure for it is the fate we all share. I struggled a bit in the beginning and wondered if this was going to be another medical professional having a pop at the NHS and government and so on. I am naturally a little biased but this is a lovely book which highlights the simultaneous futility and the beauty of life.

David Jarrett's 33 Meditations, the fruit of forty years of professional experience with people at the end of their lives, is not only timely and important, but hugely enjoyable. It is a bitter-sweet reflection of a life well lived but one that is courageous enough to face the realities of life and the human condition. I am still working, albeit part time, as a consultant geriatrician and stroke physician on the south coast of England.

No one wants to live long enough to sit incapacitated in a wheelchair in the corridor of a hospital or nursing home. I read this book over the course of one day and now I am passing it on to friends to read and discuss. This unusual and important book is a series of reflections on death in all its forms: the science of it, the medicine, the tragedy and the comedy. This is a big omission and the book would have been far more rounded had it touched upon this aspect of ageing and dying. My cynical side thinks it’s because keeping an old patient alive generates way more money for the medical community.I am happy to talk on end of life decisions in the elderly, dementia prevention, the history of stroke disease, biological ageing or other topics covered in 33 Meditation on Death. A mixture of reminiscences drawn from the author's family life and a long medical career and reflections on how to deal with death and dying. But my observation is that iliving to an old age - a slow death - is as bad as the author describes. Bursting with empathy, common sense and humour, would that we could all be so fortunate as to have the author at our bedside when the time comes.

And I loathe fish, can't eat lamb and must steer clear of certain other foods that make my skin itch. Dr David Jarrett draws on family stories and case histories from his thirty years of treating the old, demented and frail to try to find his own understanding of the end.I’ve recommended this book to so many and my parents have read this as a result (and also loved it)! Profound, provocative, strangely funny and astonishingly compelling, it is an impassioned plea that we start talking frankly and openly about death. I discovered this book after a guest speaker on a radio 4 programme mentioned it and thought I’d give it a go. He marries the importance of keeping ourselves useful with the necessity not to take ourselves too seriously. A refrain throughout the book is: "Just because a treatment can be given does not mean it should be given.