Key Insights From:
Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
By Atul Gawande
Key Insights From:
Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
By Atul Gawande
What You'll Learn:
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.
Key Insights:
- The process of aging withered from a collective art to a solitary act.
- Nursing homes evolved from a shortage of hospital space—now, they inhibit happiness.
- Aging isn’t the end; in fact, it’s only the beginning of fulfillment.
- Meaning is medicine for the elderly and the ill.
- Medicine must look at death in order to nurture life.
- Our lives are broken circles that need to be closed—the human brain requires a “dying role.”
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