Timothy E. Quill, M.D., is associate chief of medicine at The Genesee Hospital in Rochester and professor of medicine and psychiatry at the University of Rochester.

Quill's portraits of his own role and that of other physicians who have aided their patients in dying are direct, honest, and extremely informative... Many readers will see Quill's composite portrait as the best, most evocative description of a physician's appropriate role in assisting a patient who is dying, that of a 'midwife through the dying process'-a phrase he borrowed from one of his patients. New England Journal of Medicine