“I flipped through the CT scan images, the diagnosis obvious: the lungs were matted with innumerable tumors, the spine deformed, a full lobe of the liver obliterated. Cancer, widely disseminated,” wrote 36-year-old neurosurgical resident Paul Kalanithi.

Over the six years of his training, Kalanithi had seen many such scans. He continued, “But this scan was different: it was my own.”

Kalanithi’s heartbreaking memoir, When Breath Becomes Air (2016), published posthumously by his wife, explored his valiant struggle: “Death may be a one-time event, but living with a terminal illness is a process.” Within 22 months from the time of diagnosis, Kalanithi would be dead.

With symptoms, including substantial weight loss and severe back pain for months, Kalanithi began to suspect the dreaded diagnosis; when test results confirmed his suspicions, he knew, as a physician, what lay ahead.

The experience of New York Times literary critic Anatole Broyard was very different. Though he had lived through the terminal illness of his father many years earlier, Broyard described himself, at age 69, as having had almost no relationship with doctors and felt like a “mere beginner” as a patient. Diagnosed with prostate cancer, he was dead within 14 months.

Written almost 35 years ago, Broyard’s book, Intoxicated by My Illness, can still serve as a template for the expectations patients may have of their physicians and what it is like to experience thoughts about their mortality.

“To the typical physician, my illness is a routine incident in his rounds, while for me, it’s the crisis of my life. I would feel better if I had a doctor who at least perceived this incongruity,” wrote Broyard. He wanted not only a talented physician but a “bit of a metaphysician, too. Someone who can treat body and soul.”

Broyard described difficulties in choosing a doctor because it is the “first explicit confrontation with our illness.” Like Tolstoy’s first line of Anna Karenina, “…each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” Broyard acknowledged that each person is ill in his or her own way.

A physician, at least for him, should have style and “should be able to........

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