“I had passed from the subject to the direct object of every sentence in my life. In fourteenth century philosophy, the word patient simply meant “the object of an action,” and I felt like one. As a doctor, I was an agent, a cause; as a patient, I was merely something to which things happened.”

“I had passed from the subject to the direct object of every sentence in my life. In fourteenth century philosophy, the word patient simply meant “the object of an action,” and I felt like one. As a doctor, I was an agent, a cause; as a patient, I was merely something to which things happened.”

— Paul Kalanithi