Final Exam
A Surgeon's Reflections on Mortality

When Pauline Chen began medical school, she dreamed of saving lives. What she didn't count on was how much death would be a part of her work. Final Exam follows Chen over the course of her training, as she struggles to reconcile a shared humanity with her patients and to separate ideals about healing from a fierce desire to cure. Chen's transfixing and beautiful rumination on how doctors negotiate the ineluctable fact of death becomes, in the end, a brilliant questioning of how we should live. Moving and provocative, informed equally by clinical expertise and extraordinary personal grace, this is a piercing and compassionate journey into the heart of a world that is hidden and yet touches all of our lives.