by Chris Hackler

About the author: Chris Hackler is the director of the Division of Medical Humanities at the University of Arkansas College of Medicine.

Consider the last years of Jonathan Swift, an Irish clergyman and one of the keenest satiric minds Britain has produced. This brilliant man of letters slowly lost all distinctly human qualities.

His mind crumbled to pieces. It took him eight years to die while his brain rotted. He read the third chapter of Job on his birthday as long as he could see. “And Job spake, and said, Let the day perish when I was born, and the night in which it was said, There is a man-child conceived.” The pain in Swift’s eye was so acute that it took five men to hold...