Tag: Thomas Cottle

  • A Living Resume

    On the occasion of my last birthday, a friend asked how it feels to be growing old? I proffered first, the old bromide that in my head I feelabout thirty, but my body groans a wholly different story. Then I joked that when people intone, “Well, you’re only as old as you feel,” I reflexively…

  • Age and Judgment

    I was struck recently by the concluding sentences of an article written by Nathaniel Morris, a Harvard Medical School student. Note his final words. “. . . health care providers must discern when to apply the powerful instruments at their disposal and when to carefully hold back. It often just comes down to clinical judgment,…

  • How Hospital Care Should Work

    This is a corny essay by a man who, having recently undergone surgery, was reminded of those people who, in tending to our health, urge us to focus on what issues properly define life.  First it was the emergency room where I observed the palpable concern on the face of a woman whose only job…

  • Struggling With One’s Age

    I see now the problems I experience confronting old age. Of all things, the words of literary critics, and more generally, the function of literary criticism, clarify the struggle I face practically every morning in one manner or another, as I feel the culture slipping away from me like a dock finally unleashed from its…