Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

An Amazon Best Book of the Month, October 2014: True or false: Modern medicine is a miracle that has transformed all of our lives.

If you said �true,� you�d be right, of course, but that�s a statement that demands an asterisk, a �but.� �We�ve been wrong about what our job is in medicine,� writes Atul Gawande, a surgeon (at Brigham and Women�s Hospital in Boston) and a writer (at the New Yorker). �We think. . .[it] is to ensure health and survival. But really. . .it is to enable well-being. And well-being is about the reasons one wishes to be alive.� Through interviews with doctors, stories from and about health care providers (such as the woman who pioneered the notion of �assisted living� for the elderly)�and eventually, by way of the story of his own father�s dying, Gawande examines the cracks in the system of health care to the aged (i.e. 97 percent of medical students take no course in geriatrics) and to the seriously ill who might have different needs and expectations than the ones family members predict. (One striking example: the terminally ill former professor who told his daughter that �quality of life� for him meant the ongoing ability to enjoy chocolate ice cream and watch football on TV. If medical treatments might remove those pleasures, well, then, he wasn�t sure he would submit to such treatments.) Doctors don�t listen, Gawande suggests�or, more accurately, they don�t know what to listen for. (Gawande includes examples of his own failings in this area.) Besides, they�ve been trained to want to find cures, attack problems�to win. But victory doesn�t look the same to everyone, he asserts. Yes, �death is the enemy,� he writes. �But the enemy has superior forces. Eventually, it wins. And in a war that you cannot win, you don�t want a general who fights to the point of total annihilation. You don�t want Custer. You want Robert E. Lee… someone who knows how to fight for territory that can be won and how to surrender it when it can�t.� In his compassionate, learned way, Gawande shows all of us�doctors included�how mortality must be faced, with both heart and mind. � Sara Nelson

�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 (UK)

�A deeply affecting, urgently important book-one not just about dying and the limits of medicine but about living to the last with autonomy, dignity, and joy.� ?Katherine Boo

�Dr. Gawande’s book is not of the kind that some doctors write, reminding us how grim the fact of death can be. Rather, he shows how patients in the terminal phase of their illness can maintain important qualities of life.� ?Wall Street Journal (Best Books of 2014)

�Being Mortal left me tearful, angry, and unable to stop talking about it for a week. . . . A surgeon himself, Gawande is eloquent about the inadequacy of medical school in preparing doctors to confront the subject of death with their patients. . . . it is rare to read a book that sparks with so much hard thinking.� ?Nature

�We have come to medicalize aging, frailty, and death, treating them as if they were just one more clinical problem to overcome. However it is not only medicine that is needed in one’s declining years but life-a life with meaning, a life as rich and full as possible under the circumstances. Being Mortal is not only wise and deeply moving, it is an essential and insightful book for our times, as one would expect from Atul Gawande, one of our finest physician writers.� ?Oliver Sacks

�Gawande’s book is so impressive that one can believe that it may well [change the medical profession] . . . May it be widely read and inwardly digested.� ?Diana Athill, Financial Times (UK)

�Eloquent, moving.� ?The Economist (Best Books of 2014)

�A great read that leaves you better equipped to face the future, and without making you feel like you just took your medicine.� ?Mother Jones (Best Books of 2014)

�Beautiful.� ?New Republic

�Gawande displays the precision of his surgical craft and the compassion of a humanist . . . in a narrative that often attains the force and beauty of a novel . . . Only a precious few books have the power to open our eyes while they move us to tears. Atul Gawande has produced such a work. One hopes it is the spark that ignites some revolutionary changes in a field of medicine that ultimately touches each of us.� ?Shelf Awareness (Best Books of 2014)

�A needed call to action, a cautionary tale of what can go wrong, and often does, when a society fails to engage in a sustained discussion about aging and dying.� ?San Francisco Chronicle