The Measure of Our Days: A Spiritual Exploration of Illness

Jerome Groopman's “The Measure of Our Days” is a compelling look at what we can learn about living when life itself can no longer be taken for granted because of severe illness. Jerome Groopman, M.D., one of the world's leading researchers in cancer and AIDS, is Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Chief of Experimental Medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. His laboratory helped to develop the new protease inhibitors for the treatment of AIDS, and in January of 1998 his laboratory identified another gene that appears to play a role in breast cancer.

Groopman has written extensively for many publications such as The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The New Yorker, and The New Republic and Time magazine as well as medical and scientific journals. “The Measure of Our Days” tells the reader about Groopman's technique with patients, not directly, but through stories. Groopman takes his title from a Psalm of David, Psalm 39, "Lord, make me to know mine end, and the measure of my days, what it is; that I may know how frail I am.”

Dr. Groopman, as well as being a prolific writer, has an exceptional insight of the importance of confronting one's death, both for the patient and for their family and friends. The eight patients he synopsis’s vary extensively in their personalities and in their ailments, yet each of them in the end display a kind of heroism, strength, and the power to change their lives no matter what their diagnosis. Groopman's book is more than a collection of moving stories about sick people; it is about the strength hope gives us in times of need.

Groopman accounts the illnesses and deaths of four AIDS patients; there is the young boy who survived acute myeloblastic leukemia, but died of AIDS, from a blood transfusion, later in his teens; the physician with hemophilia, a fellow in Groopman's own research laboratory, who had been infected with HIV; an aged European businessman, and a young woman who contracted AIDS on vacation in Martinique. The book shows how she disengaged herself from the other AIDS patients in the waiting room because she did not want to face her future with this illness. She did not even tell her mom until she decided to adopt a child. Dan also hid his illness until he felt he had to tell Groopman incase it could effect his work. Dan felt he had to keep his illness to himself cause it might effect his place in the research team. Alex, the European businessman, also was disengaged from his family because of his lifestyle. These cases show the disengagement theory. Disengagement theory describes how associations between people and other members of civilization are disengaged or altered in quality; each of these events constitutes a form of disengagement.

There are three cases of cancer, a man with renal-cell carcinoma, the young woman with metastatic breast cancer who refuses medical treatment in favor of Tao healing, and his friend who was successfully treated for a lymphoma, only to have acute leukemia develop. There is the Boston matriarch who has myelofibrosis, who is rich and set in her ways. She tells Groopman that “the mayor should be Irish, the barber Italian, and the doctor a Jew." (p.169)

Perhaps without intending it, Groopman raises vital insights about the outlook of medicine’s future; one dilemma it illustrates where future physicians like Groopman will come from. Will we run out of compassionate physicians? Hopefully, we will not. I worry about a kind of physician who is not only an superb medical professional, wonderful teacher, and an exceptional research scientist. Physicians with these talents have always been in short supply, but now they are in very short supply.