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.