Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

#1 New York Times Bestseller

In Being Mortal, bestselling author Atul Gawande tackles the hardest challenge of his profession: how medicine can not only improve life but also the process of its ending

Medicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming birth, injury, and infectious disease from harrowing to manageable. But in the inevitable condition of aging and death, the goals of medicine seem too frequently to run counter to the interest of the human spirit. Nursing homes, preoccupied with safety, pin patients into railed beds and wheelchairs. Hospitals isolate the dying, checking for vital signs long after the goals of cure have become moot. Doctors, committed to extending life, continue to carry out devastating procedures that in the end extend suffering.

Gawande, a practicing surgeon, addresses his profession's ultimate limitation, arguing that quality of life is the desired goal for patients and families. Gawande offers examples of freer, more socially fulfilling models for assisting the infirm and dependent elderly, and he explores the varieties of hospice care to demonstrate that a person's last weeks or months may be rich and dignified.

Full of eye-opening research and riveting storytelling, Being Mortal asserts that medicine can comfort and enhance our experience even to the end, providing not only a good life but also a good end.

Author: Atul Gawande
Publisher: Metropolitan Books
Published: 10/07/2014
Pages: 304
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.85lbs
Size: 8.30h x 5.80w x 1.20d
ISBN: 9780805095159


Award: New England Book Award - Winner
Award: L.A. Times Book Prize - Finalist
Award: Books for a Better Life - Winner
Award: Indies Choice Book Awards - Winner


Review Citation(s):
Library Journal Prepub Alert 05/15/2014 pg. 50
Kirkus Reviews 08/01/2014
Kirkus Reviews Fall Preview 08/15/2014 pg. 29
Booklist 10/01/2014 pg. 8
Shelf Awareness 10/10/2014
New York Times Book Review 11/16/2014 pg. 26
New York Times Book Review 11/09/2014 pg. 14
NY Times Notable Bks of Year 12/07/2014 pg. 27
Shelf Awareness 12/12/2014
Christian Century 12/10/2014 pg. 25
Booklist Editors Choice/Adult 01/01/2015 pg. 8
New York Review of Books 01/08/2015 pg. 20
BookPage 10/01/2014
Christian Century 02/18/2015 pg. 32
New York Times Book Review 05/17/2015 pg. 28
Choice 06/01/2015
Library Journal 05/15/2014

About the Author
Atul Gawande is the author of four bestselling books: Complications, a finalist for the National Book Award; Better; The Checklist Manifesto, and Being Mortal. 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 Founder and Chair of Ariadne Labs, a joint center for health systems innovation, and Lifebox, a nonprofit organization making surgery safer globally. He is also chair of Haven, where he was CEO from 2018-2020. He and his wife have three children and live in Newton, Massachusetts.