I listened to The Seven Ages of Death by Dr Richard Shepherd on audio where it was read by the author. The author is a criminal pathologist and has conducted very many postmortems to determine causes of death. In this book he talks about some of the interesting cases he has seen in his career and uses them to talk about death at various stages of life, from the very young to the very old. He also talks about what this has taught him about mortality, our attitudes to death and about how we live. He also shares issues from his own life and how he doesn’t always do what he knows he needs to in order to prolong life.
One of the things he explores, after examining the death of a young boy, is the search for people to use alternative medicine and remedies and why people might mistrust conventional medicine. He examines the most common causes of death in children and also the things that can make dementia worse, or easier. He tackles the difficult issue about when we should stop treating diseases and how we manage end of life care. He also talks about what he found when he undertook an examination of the death of Dr David Kelly, who was the weapons expert who almost certainly died by suicide but whose cause of death is still challenged today.
The author writes with kindness and respect for the people that he deals with but includes a lot of information to show how common these types of death are in each age group, for example, one in five people currently die of illnesses related to smoking. This is not just a glimpse into the cases he covers but it is also the story of how we grow old and what the risks are at each point of life. It’s not at all morbid and I found it fascinating.
