Why I Hope To Die At 75 Analysis

With time, society slowly gains more power and dominance over the minds of the people being baited into their own image of life. Death is portrayed as the end of life, but with each death comes new life to nurture and foresee. Ezekiel Emanuel, author of “Why I Hope to Die at 75”, discusses his ideal date of death, which would naturally cause controversy between many people. Through his experiences, outlook of the world, and statistics, Emanuel came up with the number 75, which he defends resolutely. In “Pursuing a Peaceful Death”, author Daniel Callahan takes death very seriously and how people should die. He talks about different ways death can lose its meaning and what it means to have a peaceful death. Edward Tenner, author of
Medicine has come a long way in curing and treating its patients, but it has also brought new threats onto humanity. It seems to be revenge from death, since medicines main focus is prolonging death. Emanuel stresses throughout his article that as people grow older, it is harder for them to function fluently after acquiring any illnesses. He talked about strokes and medicines achievement in reducing morality of strokes, but “Americans who have survived a stroke suffer from paralysis or an inability to speak. And … suffer from more-subtle brain dysfunction” (Emanuel 77). Although medicine treats strokes with more ease, the effects that come after have not been dealt with. Emanuel has come to the conclusion that diseases and illnesses older people acquire will further disable them through the ways medicine works. This is an example of medicine’s “repair and adaption” method, which has made the “revenge effects of medicine” even stronger. The stroke will be treated and the patient must adapt, only to be hit by medicine’s revenge with mental dysfunction. As a matter of fact, Tenner mainly discusses this method in his excerpt; “theorists believe that lasting tissue damage may make the body less resistant to future stress by shifting resources to ‘repair and adaptation’” (Tenner 56). Doctors aim to repair the tissue damage dealt by a disease and then make patients adapt to them in some type of way, but adapting means changing to fit into the new circumstances given. If adapting occurs, then the person will now be dealing with whatever new challenges arose from the illness acquired or tissue damage, like strokes leading to mental dysfunctions if treated. It is a method that leads to the patient having more health issues after already being treated by medicine. This is all a way to cheat death, but embracing death in