Making lives meaningful in old age

“The problem with medicine and the institutions it has spawned for the care of the sick and the old is not that they have had an incorrect view of what makes life significant. The problem is that they have had almost no view at all. Medicine’s focus is narrow. Medical professionals concentrate on repair of health, not sustenance of the soul… Making lives meaningful in old age … requires more imagination and invention than making them merely safe does.”

Atul Gawande

“In 1991, in the tiny town of New Berlin, in upstate New York, a young physician named Bill Thomas performed and experiment. He didn’t really know what he was doing. He was thirty-one years old, less than two years out of family medicine residency, and he had just taken a new job as medical director of Case Memorial Nursing Home, a facility with eighty severely disabled elderly residents. About…