Atul Gawande
Atul Gawande (born November 5, 1965) is an American surgeon, writer, and public health researcher. He practices general and endocrine surgery at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. He is a professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Samuel O. Thier Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School. In public health, he is executive director of Ariadne Labs, a joint center for health systems innovation, and chairman of Lifebox, a nonprofit that works on reducing deaths in surgery globally.
He has also written extensively on medicine and public health for The New Yorker and Slate, and is the author of the books Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science; Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance; The Checklist Manifesto; and Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End.
Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
Four glowingly bare hospital walls watch as patients slip out of life. Ventilators and breathing tubes, intrusive IVs, and beeping equipment make up the components of a modern-day death. Despite the fact that medicine is more advanced than ever, it’s made the process of dying more brutal as patients lose their dignity in the hopeless pursuit of more life. Prior to 1945, a majority of deaths took place in the familiarity of the home, but by the 1980s that number plummeted to 17%. Culture views medicine as an incorruptible tool, a safeguard against mortality, but sadly, that’s not the case. Bestselling author and surgeon Atul Gawande takes readers through a poetic observation of the modern experience of dying, unraveling its evolution and diagnosing how we might better protect the humanity of those we are losing.
Bio information sourced from Wikipedia
