Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

Thu, 18 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Doctors are trained to save lives, not to care for the dying. Gawande, a surgeon, names the painful paradox at the center of that training: medical professionals concentrate on the repair of health, not the sustenance of the soul, and yet we’ve handed them the job of defining how we live our final days. Death is normal. It is the natural order of things, not a failure. But medicine keeps treating it as one, trading away a dying person’s remaining autonomy for a few more weeks of survival, often causing enormous suffering in pursuit of treatments that barely help. The book asks a better question than “how do we keep this person alive?” It asks what someone wants their last chapter to hold.

Atul Gawande on SummaryShelf

Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End