Being Mortal Illness Medicine & What

Description

Medicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming birth, injury, and infectious disease from harrowing to manageable. But in the inevitable condition of aging and death, the goals of medicine seem too frequently to run counter to the interest of the human spirit. Nursing homes, preoccupied with safety, pin patients into railed beds and wheelchairs. Hospitals isolate the dying, checking for vital signs long after the goals of cure have become moot. Doctors, committed to extending life, continue to carry out devastating procedures that in the end extend suffering. Gawande, a practicing surgeon, addresses his profession's ultimate limitation, arguing that quality of life is the desired goal for patients and families. Gawande offers examples of freer, more socially fulfilling models for assisting the infirm and dependent elderly, and he explores the varieties of hospice care to demonstrate that a person's last weeks or months may be rich and dignified

Awards

New York Times Bestseller
Washington Post 10 Best Books of 2014
Apple iBooks 10 Best of 2014
New York Times Book Review 100 Notable Books of 2014
NPR Best Books of 2014

Reviews

"Illuminating."—Janet Maslin, The New York Times
"Being Mortal, Atul Gawande’s masterful exploration of aging, death, and the medical profession’s mishandling of both, is his best and most personal book yet."—Boston Globe
"American medicine, Being Mortal reminds us, has prepared itself for life but not for death. This is Atul Gawande’s most powerful—and moving—book."—Malcolm Gladwell
"Beautifully crafted . . . Being Mortal　is a clear-eyed, informative exploration of what growing old means in the 21st　century . . . a book I cannot recommend highly enough. This should be mandatory reading for every American. . . . it provides a useful roadmap of what we can and should be doing to make the last years of life meaningful."—Time.com
"Masterful . . . Essential . . . For more than a decade, Atul Gawande has explored the fault lines of medicine . . . combining his years of experience as a surgeon with his gift for fluid, seemingly effortless storytelling . . . In Being Mortal, he turns his attention to his most important subject yet."—Chicago Tribune
"Beautifully written . . . In his newest and best book, Gawande . . . has provided us with a moving and clear-eyed look at aging and death in our society, and at the harms we do in turning it into a medical problem, rather than a human one."—The New York Review of Books
"Powerful."—New York Magazine
"Atul Gawande’s wise and courageous book raises the questions that none of us wants to think about . . . Remarkable."—John Carey, The Sunday Times 
 

Author description

Atul Gawande is a surgeon, writer and public health researcher. He practices general and endocrine surgery at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. He is also Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School and Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard School of Public Health. He writes regularly for the New Yorker, and is the author of Better (9781861976574), Complications (9781846681325) and The Checklist Manifesto (9781846683145).