Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

Atul Gawande

Oct 2014 · Sold by Metropolitan Books

About this ebook

#1 New York Times Bestseller

In Being Mortal, bestselling author Atul Gawande tackles the hardest challenge of his profession: how medicine can not only improve life but also the process of its ending

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.

Full of eye-opening research and riveting storytelling, Being Mortal asserts that medicine can comfort and enhance our experience even to the end, providing not only a good life but also a good end.

Ratings and reviews

It took me a long time to finish this book. While it is a good book, you have to be in the mindset that life ends to really get through it. It is sad and depressing but after finishing the book, it had made me look different at life.

This book does a great job of outlining the options available when we get to the end. Some excellent personal stories by the author that highlight the reality of what is encountered, with no shying away from his own challenges despite being a doctor.

...whether for themselves, their spouses, their parents... at some time or another we are all faced with hard choices that we could better make if we knew what our loved ones wishes are. Guwande gives personal examples from his life and his practice that show how one might go about navigating those rough waters.

About the author

Atul Gawande is author of three bestselling books: Complications, a finalist for the National Book Award; Better, selected by Amazon as one of the ten best books of 2007; and The Checklist Manifesto. His latest book is Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End. He is also a surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, a staff writer for The New Yorker, and a professor at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health. He has won the Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science, a MacArthur Fellowship, and two National Magazine Awards. In his work in public health, he is Executive Director of Ariadne Labs, a joint center for health systems innovation, and chairman of Lifebox, a nonprofit organization making surgery safer globally. He and his wife have three children and live in Newton, Massachusetts.