Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

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National Geographic Books, Sep 5, 2017 - Medical - 304 pages
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 or analog beings, social beings or solitary beings. We are mortal beings. And in that is every important thing to know about how we must live.

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About the author (2017)

ATUL GAWANDE is a surgeon, writer, and public health researcher. He practices general and endocrine surgery at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. He is also Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School and Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard School of Public Health. He has been a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine since 1998. He has written three New York Times-bestselling books: Complications, which was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2002; Better; and The Checklist Manifesto. He has won two National Magazine Awards, Academy Health's Impact Award for highest research impact on health care, a MacArthur Award, and selection by Foreign Policy Magazine and Time magazine as one of the world's top 100 influential thinkers.

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