Word usage and intentional clarity will influence how patients feel about that Whipple pancreaticoduodenectomy surgery.

Calls to expand palliative care education have been explicit since the 1990s, but palliative care training in surgery remains too narrowly focused on end of life.

Priorities far beyond generating morbidity or mortality data are needed to improve patients’ experiences, innovate metrics, and advance surgical palliation as a field.

Guidance about sedation to unconsciousness and medically ineffective interventions can be applied to surgical palliation.

Clinician-family communication in surgical intensive care units should focus on reducing value incongruence and nonbeneficial operations.

Seeming incongruity between surgery and palliation reiterates patients’ needs for clinicians to be able to identify when and how they should coexist.

Health educators have duties to teach patient focus, motivate equity, and cultivate students’ capacity to serve our most vulnerable neighbors, wherever they reside.

Sheltering in place is impossible for persons to whom “safer at home” does not apply.

Standards for posttransplant graft/survival rates do not reward transplant centers for performing riskier transplants to increase population benefit.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres' and Gregg Bordowitz’s works express their experiences of living through a pandemic and subsequent social change and draw out key human rights themes.