The other classroom: Returning to sacred knowledge

Chicago, Illinois - The breathing machine was too loud for the dying man's son to hear his father's final words.

Tariq Lateef held the phone to his patient's mouth anyway. When the words disappeared beneath the mechanical hiss, Lateef repeated them himself, sentence by sentence, into the speaker. Although the son arrived before his father died, by the time he did, his father was no longer conscious.

Six months earlier, he had cared for the man's wife through the same illness, helping the family reach the decision that allowed her to die peacefully at home. Now the husband had reached the same point. He was exhausted. The treatments keeping him alive had become the very thing preventing him from saying goodbye.

Lateef, 40, did everything medicine had trained him to do. Afterwards, he says, he "felt so inadequate" trying to understand the role of the physician when death could no longer be postponed.

It wasn't simply that he wanted better answers. He wanted to understand the problem itself.

What is medicine actually for? What makes a death good? Who gets to decide?

Lateef is a hospice and palliative care physician, yet the longer he has practised, the more he has found himself reaching beyond the limits of everything he has been taught.

He began pulling at the foundations beneath modern medical ethics.