It makes perfect sense to me that Dr. Kalanithi completed a master’s thesis on Walt Whitman’s conceptualization of “the Physiological-Spiritual Man.” He knew that literature provides “the richest material for moral reflection.” Unfortunately, it also makes sense that one of his thesis advisers told him that it would be difficult to find a community in the literary world “because most English Ph.D.s react to science, as he put it, ‘like apes to fire, with sheer terror.’”

Is this one of the reasons the humanities are currently endangered?

Dr. Kalanithi’s memoir asks humanists pointed questions about what must be done to make their disciples supple in an engagement with science. Considering issues at the intersection of literature, philosophy and medicine, Dr. Kalanithi also underscores the importance of the medical humanities: a multidisciplinary field that involves artists, humanists, social scientists and scientists in issues related to wellness and sickness.

In the epilogue of “When Breath Becomes Air,” supplied by Dr. Kalanithi’s widow, Lucy, we are informed that his oncologist wanted him videotaped daily, doing the same task, so his deficits could be tracked. He decided to recite from T.S. Eliot’s “Waste Land,” setting the book facedown. We also learn that when his fingertips developed fissures from chemotherapy, he wore seamless, silver-lined gloves that allowed him to use his trackpad and keyboard. Composing “When Breath Becomes Air” became his palliative therapy as well as the consummation of his love of literature.

The example of Dr. Kalanithi proves that we need more physicians who assimilate the arts and the humanities as well as more artists and humanists who assimilate the science of medicine. By connecting the empirical, reproducible data of cancer science to visceral, unpredictable and subjective experiences of the disease, “When Breath Becomes Air” points toward an approach that can mitigate the mutual incomprehension that baffles too many doctors and patients.

Dr. Kalanithi illuminates how the arts and humanities can help us negotiate that moment we will all inevitably confront: when our breath becomes the air others breathe.