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Unseen Design: How We Underestimate the Tangled Wisdom of the Human Throat

As a medical student, I mocked the throat’s design, and as a young hospitalist, I viewed it as a significant threat to my patients. But after years of working as a physician, I came to also see it as the body’s way out of life. Aspiration pneumonia was once called “old man’s friend” because it often brings a dignified end to prolonged suffering in the elderly and ill. Like a cyanide pill kept in a locket, the throat’s precarious anatomy becomes a degraded body’s escape hatch. And sometimes, no matter how much we want the people we love to hold on for a little longer—such as when my wife’s grandfather with Parkinson’s disease was repeatedly admitted to the hospital with one pneumonia after…

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