Papadimos Thomas J, Stawicki Stanislaw Pa
Department of Anesthesiology, Division of Critical Care, Trauma, and Burn, The Ohio State University Medical Center, 410 West 10 Street, Columbus, Ohio 43210, USA.
Int J Crit Illn Inj Sci. 2011 Jul;1(2):125-8. doi: 10.4103/2229-5151.84798.
Medical practice and the field of humanities frequently intersect. It is uncanny how problems presented or described in literature that are several hundred years old still present themselves to us on a regular basis. Often, our answers to these dilemmas are not perfect, but we continue our attempts at providing solutions through an enlightened evolution of our thought and approaches. Leo Tolstoy's novella, The Death of Ivan Ilych, is a classic piece of literature that allows a view of the dying process in an ordinary human being, and presents us with an opportunity to observe, not only the intersection of medicine and humanities, but also that of critical care and palliative medicine. Here Tolstoy, through his keen observation of the human condition at the end of life, allows us an opportunity to view a 19(th) century perspective that has an all too familiar persistence that needs a 21(st) century intervention.
医学实践与人文领域常常相互交织。几百年来文学作品中呈现或描述的问题如今仍经常出现在我们面前，这实在令人不可思议。通常，我们对这些困境的答案并不完美，但我们仍不断尝试通过思想和方法的开明演进提供解决方案。列夫·托尔斯泰的中篇小说《伊凡·伊里奇之死》是一部经典文学作品，它让我们得以窥见一个普通人的临终过程，不仅为我们提供了观察医学与人文交汇的机会，也让我们有机会观察重症监护与姑息医学的交汇。在这里，托尔斯泰通过对生命尽头人类状况的敏锐观察，让我们有机会审视一种19世纪的观点，这种观点有着太过熟悉的延续性，需要21世纪的干预。
