The Alma and Joseph Gildenhorn Book Series Featuring Atul Gawande
The Alma and Joseph Gildenhorn Book Series will feature Atul Gawande, staff writer at New Yorker magazine and professor at Harvard School of Public Health, discussing his book “Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End” (Metropolitan Books). Moderated by Rob Stein, correspondent and science editor, NPR Science Desk.
About the Book:Â
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. (Amazon.com)
About the Author:
Atul Gawande is the author of “The Checklist Manifesto, Better, and Complications.” He is also a MacArthur Fellow, a general surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a staff writer at The New Yorker, and an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health. He lives with his wife and three children in Newton, Massachusetts.
The Alma and Joseph Gildenhorn Book Series will feature Atul Gawande, staff writer at New Yorker magazine and professor at Harvard School of Public Health, discussing his book “Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End” (Metropolitan Books). Moderated by Rob Stein, correspondent and science editor, NPR Science Desk.