Being Mortal
Medicine and What Matters in the End
INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
From surgeon and bestselling author Atul Gawande, a book that has the potential to change medicine--and lives.
Being Mortal looks at the way modern medicine has changed the experience of dying, what the implications of this change are for each of us, and what we would need to do to change a system that knows a lot about prolonging life but little about tending to death.
At the heart of this book is something larger and more lasting than even its agenda for how to effect change: it is a deeply humane portrayal of how our society copes with who we really are. We are not economic beings. We are not political beings. We are not digital beings…
Atul Gawande is the author of three bestselling books: Complications, a finalist for the National Book Award; Better, selected by Amazon.com as one of the ten best books of 2007; and The Checklist Manifesto. He is also a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, a staff writer for The New Yorker, and a professor at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health. He has won the Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science, a MacArthur Fellowship, and two National Magazine Awards. In his work in public health, he is director of Ariadne Labs, a joint center for health systems innovation, and chairman of Lifebox, a nonprofit organization making surgery safer globally. He and his wife…
