Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
Medicine is extraordinarily good at keeping people alive. What it has never quite managed is preparing them to die. For the elderly and the terminally ill, death is not a distant possibility but a matter of timing, and surgeon Atul Gawande believes the medical profession has been looking away from that truth for far too long. In this quietly urgent book, Gawande makes the case that accepting mortality, rather than fighting it at every turn, should sit at the heart of how we care for dying patients. It's a bold argument, and he builds it carefully. Drawing on his own clinical experiences (including some painful errors of judgement), he sets attitudes towards ageing and death in Western medicine alongside those he observed in India, revealing how differently societies can understand the final chapter of a life. At the centre of the book is a portrait of his own father, also a doctor, who faced his death with deliberateness and dignity. It gives the whole work a personal weight that no amount of research alone could supply. With rising hospital costs and greying populations across the globe, the questions Gawande raises feel pressing rather than abstract. This is a book that thinks hard, feels deeply, and asks something genuinely important of its readers.
- Author: Atul Gawande
- Publisher: Penguin
- Genre: Lifestyle & Wellness
- ISBN: 978-0143425571
- Pages: 296 pages