It is easy to acknowledge that medicine works wonders in people’s lives; it is much more difficult to accept the one thing that medicine will never be able to cure: death.
Atul Gawande’s “Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End” is a book with heart, and it attempts to share that heart with those who read it. The author sets out to remind readers of their own mortality and encourages them to confront it in the medical field.
His understanding of our medical system comes from a firsthand perspective—Dr. Gawande is himself a surgeon. He has seen doctors subscribe patients to miserable circumstances all in the name of a longer life. “Some will be alarmed by the prospect of a doctor’s writing about the inevitability of decline and death,” he admits. But death is a reality that requires contemplation.
“Being Mortal” is a book that asks what it means to be alive. Dr. Gawande finds one answer in the geriatric wing of his hospital, watching chief geriatrician Juergen Bludau give examinations. “The job of any doctor, Bludau later told me, is to support quality of life, by which he meant two things: as much freedom from the ravages of disease as possible and the retention of enough function for active engagement in the world.”
