QotD: the Goal of Medicine

[liveonearth]

If medicine takes aim at death prevention, rather than at health and relief of suffering, if it regards every death as premature, as a failure of today's medicine - but avoidable by tomorrow's - then it is tacitly asserting that its true goal is bodily immortality... Physicians should try to keep their eyes on the main business, restoring and correcting what can be corrected and restored, always acknowledging that death will and must come, that health is a mortal good, and that as embodied beings we are fragile beings that must stop sooner or later, medicine or no medicine.
--Kass, L.R. in JAMA 1980.244:1947