Mortality

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There is no tinted glass here, no windowless room. Christopher Hitchens faces death and his own mortality with the same clear-eyed attentiveness, truthfulness and razor-sharp intelligence that he applied to any other subject throughout his life. No self-pity, no sentimentality, no avoiding the pain and suffering, no swerving away from the ultimate absence of "higher meaning". He looks death in the face every step of the way. Assuredly an oncologist knows the score better than any lay person. So I found it striking that he chose this course of action, or no-action, as it were. Quality time over quantity, apparently. Update to the spoiler below My son ended up having several surgical procedures and is well on the mend. Today he heard that he passed his finals in law. So now it's on to law school. Thank you everyone for the good wishes. It was a hard year to live through. Plague is a disease of rodents. People are simply collateral damage, wastage in a titanic global struggle between the plague bacillus Yersinia pestis and the world’s rodent population.”

Sunspots are over-implicated in scientific literature as the cause of decadally repeating phenomena. He should have included that caveat when invoking sunspots. The book spends quite a bit of time discussing anti-Semitism, the frequency with which Jews were blamed for the plague, and the vicious, abominable violence against them. Mercifully, at no point does Kelly try to lighten up his work by turning anti-Semitism into an entity that can stop and pay its respects to this or that historical figure, or have this or that cutesy twentieth/twenty-first-century motive for its movements and activities. Which is a good thing, because it would be completely gross. Whatever one's opinion on Christopher Hitchens' religious views, it's indisputable that the man can write. This collection of essays was penned after his diagnosis of terminal esophageal cancer and before his untimely death. The following is Carol Blue’s afterword to her husband Christopher Hitchens’ book Mortality, out in September from Twelve.Thankfully, as a respite, Kelly intersperses the plague-death descriptions with some fascinating discussions about ancillary topics. One of those is filth, and I loved how Kelly showed the evolution from antiquity’s “ingenious sanitation techniques” – underground sewers, aqueducts, and public bathhouses – to Middle Age Europeans shouting “look out below” three times before emptying chamber pots onto the street. There is also a section on the Flagellants, who traveled hither and yon beating themselves in a public display that straddled hyper-religiosity and sexual kink. It is extraordinary to read the inner life of anybody grappling with oncoming death, and Hitch being Hitch he has done it differently and memorably. Linklater, Alexander (26 August 2012) " Mortality by Christopher Hitchens – review" in The Observer The day I found out that Christopher Hitchens had died was the day I felt as if someone from my own family had perished.

Nicholas J Petrelli, M.D. is a surgical oncologist and the Bank of America endowed medical director of ChristianaCare’s Helen F. Graham Cancer Center & Research Institute and associate director of translational research at Wistar Cancer Institute. He also serves as Associate Editor of Surgical Oncology for HemOnc Today. Interventions are also monitored during implementation and evaluated for efficacy, efficiency, impact, cost-effectiveness, and potential for improvement. Two important outcome measures are morbidity and mortality. Changes within these two measures can indicate not only the severity of a health event but also serve as one of the litmus tests for the responses that epidemiologists may take. Morbidity and mortality measures can be gathered using either descriptive or analytic epidemiology and can undergo stratification into various subcategories,such as perinatal, neonatal, infant, and maternal morbidity mortalities, to name a few.Morbidity and mortality can also be stratified by age, race, ethnicity, sex, gender, nationality, and socioeconomic status, which provide an opportunity to uncover group-specific susceptibilities or exposures within a population. From an etymological perspective, the word “epidemiology” can be divided into the Greek roots “epi,”“demos,” and “logos,” which respectively mean “upon,”“people,” and “the study of.”Historically, epidemiology has focused on population-level factors regarding communicable infectious diseases, but it has evolved to include non-communicable infectious diseases, chronic diseases, infant health, and environmental and behavioral health.Today, it is a wide-encapsulating umbrella thatencompassesany health-related issues that may influence the overall health of a population, such as environmental exposures, injuries, natural disasters, and terrorism, to name a few. It is a multifaceted branch of medicine,fundamentally guided by systematic scientific inquiry via ratios, probabilities, and other statistical calculations, focusing on the incidence, distribution, and factors concerning diseases and health outcomes within a specific population. My dear friend J., who died of cancer last year, said that there was no such thing as battling cancer. There is no chance of winning; it's a one sided war. With so dark a subject the author often managed to invest wry humor upon the subject. I had to blink several times, for example, about this supposed “interview” of some of the London victims by archeologists before I realised what the “interview” actually meant:

A regular note of admiration in the tributes that poured out from other writers at his death referred to his extraordinary memory for quotation and the resilience of his capacity to write at any time of the night – however much he had been drinking. Here he notes some of the tributes that came out after premature news of his death: "rumours of my LIFE have also been greatly exaggerated!" To be able to write while drinking was, perhaps, a sign of mental toughness; but to be able to write like this while dying stands as actual bravery. Why you should forget about diets, and focus instead on nutritional biochemistry, using technology and data to personalize your eating pattern.

Once you've read this book, you'll be glad you didn't live in the period 1347 - 1450 when the population of Europe probably halved as did China's during a similar period. Florence in Italy had 120,000 citizens in 1330 but only 37,000 in 1450. The scientific name of the plague bacillus is Yersinia pestis. Anywhere from 1,500 to 20,000 years old, Y. pestis resides at the end of a complex infection chain, its principal vector being the rodent flea. Once the flea has killed off its host – typically a rat – it jumps to humans to avoid starvation. While there are actually three types of plague, the most common form is bubonic, which causes the most striking symptom: an egg-shaped, tumorlike protuberance called a bubo. A deeply affecting, urgently important book – one not just about dying and the limits of medicine but about living to the last with autonomy, dignity, and joy.”– Katherine Boo Soon, it emerges that he has cancer of the oesophagus, the disease from which his father had died at the age of 79. Hitchens is only 61. It is clear that he will give anything to live. "I had real plans for the next decade … Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? To read – if indeed not to write – the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger?" The ancient Greeks and especially the ancient Romans had public baths, accessible to all of their citizens for a few pennies. And sewers! They had sophisticated sewers, public bathrooms and public fountains, flowing with water from mountain streams. Drinkable free water! But what were Europeans thinking, seven hundred years after the ancient but clean Romans passed? They were thinking baths are bad and Poop Cures are cool. They drank wine all day, even the children. Hmmmm.Christopher Hitchens is, by far, the world's greatest orator, thinker, debater... and I say "is", because, despite his death his words continue to reverberate. He is alive. He will always be alive. Far more seriously, The Great Mortality spends a good amount of time on the rise of anti-Semitism that followed the path of the plague. Pegged as scapegoats, pogroms broke out all over Europe, leading to the expulsion or murder of countless Jews. As Kelly points out, these pogroms were unrivaled until the 1930s. Kelly does, however, includes lots of gratuitous, pointless, and outdated culture references: "In a film about a race to identify Y. pestis, Leslie Howard would have played Yersin" (42). Seriously? OK, yeah, I know who Leslie Howard is, but he died in 1953. Kelly couldn't think of an actor more recent that him? He describes Queen Joanna of Naples and Sicily as "a combination of Scarlett O'Hara and Lizzie Borden" (91). What? Joanna was accused of murdering her husband; Lizzie Borden was a spinster accused of murdering her father and rotten stepmother. He writes then about how his many friends and his enemies respond to his illness. When someone writes to say that, on his death, he should "freeze at least my brain so that its cortex could be appreciated by posterity," he responds: "Well, I mean to say, gosh, thanks awfully." He offers a hilarious account in dialogue form of a woman coming to get a copy of his memoirs signed – he is on a book tour in the middle of all the treatment – and telling him about a friend with cancer who died an agonising death. He also manages to open a section of this book with a good new joke: "When you fall ill, people send you CDs. Very often, in my experience, these are by Leonard Cohen." I so wanted to like this book. I thought at first my brain was not operating right. Then I kept reading anyway. As an amateur historian, I am sorry to say that Kelly has written ambitious book and thst perhaps the task was too ambitious. The book is poorly organized. I wanted the major rivers of Europe included on the map as the major cities which experienced the plague. I wanted more information about the 3 plagues. I know the first two and know of the 3rd in passing. An Appendix would have given Kelly a place to explain more about the 3 plagues. I appreciate that Kelly wrote of the English peasant's Revolt where they started earning enough money to improve their standard of living. And work became easier with these new innovations. Kelly does speak of these innovations, yet an Appendix would have allowed him space to explain more. While the English peasants revolted, what about peasants in other places? Without explaining about other places, the reader might assume that peasants all revolted about the same time in relatively the same manner. The French peasants did not revolt up until the late 18th century. It took those peasants that long to get so frustrated, so hungry, so unappreciated that they felt the need to eliminate the royalty, nobility, and the wealthy to a large extent. Revolt for the same reason, at a different time, by a different method.