David Jarrett has been a doctor for forty years, thirty of which as an NHS consultant in geriatric and stroke medicine. I am naturally a little biased but this is a lovely book which highlights the simultaneous futility and the beauty of life. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. 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. If a doctor can perform an abortion or transgender operation I don’t understand why a patient can’t request an end of life assist.

Jarrett has cared for elderly patients for many years and after reading this book, one feels assured of his empathy and compassion towards all his patients.

Too much medicine and too little helping people and their families gain a realistic vision of old age and dying. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Old age and the end of life are things that we need to prepare for and discuss with our family members.

He marries the importance of keeping ourselves useful with the necessity not to take ourselves too seriously. 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)! 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. I am still working, albeit part time, as a consultant geriatrician and stroke physician on the south coast of England.

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I discovered this book after a guest speaker on a radio 4 programme mentioned it and thought I’d give it a go. I would highly recommend reading it and then discussing its contents with family members and your GP. 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.

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 very thought-provoking, and often moving book, that reveals how modern medicine can sometimes prolong suffering for both the patient and the family.