Being Mortal

Health and medicine

Print length: 287 pagesPicador, 2017

Description

In Being Mortal, surgeon Atul Gawande examines end-of-life and hospice care through personal stories and reflection. The book considers what medicine should seek to accomplish when extending survival is not the only concern. Gawande argues that patients’ well-being should take priority over treating survival as an unquestioned goal, placing the needs of the person at the center of care. His discussion approaches mortality not only as a medical matter but also as a human experience shaped by individual priorities. The result is a thoughtful consideration of how medicine can respond more meaningfully when people face serious illness, frailty, and the end of life.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Conversational · Direct · Essayistic · Journalistic

Pace

Measured

Tone

Earnest · Intimate · Melancholic · Reflective

Structure

Argumentative · Braided

Focus

Argument · Ideas · Relationships

Emotional intensity

4 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 3 / 5
Ideas: 4 / 5
Structure: 3 / 5
Background knowledge: 2 / 5

Themes

AgingFamilyFreedomMoralityMortality

About Atul Gawande

Atul Gawande is an American surgeon, public health researcher, and longtime staff writer for The New Yorker. His books bring these fields together, using clinical experience, reported cases, and research to examine how medicine works in practice. He is especially attentive to the gap between professional knowledge and actual performance: Complications considers the uncertainty and fallibility built into surgery, while Better and The Checklist Manifesto investigate how habits, coordination, and modest procedural tools can improve difficult work. His method is practical without being narrowly prescriptive. He treats mistakes as occasions to study judgment and systems rather than merely individual competence. In Being Mortal, that scrutiny widens to the aims of medicine itself, asking how care should respond when prolonging life may conflict with a patient’s well-being. Across his work, Gawande distinguishes himself by making complex medical problems legible while preserving their ethical difficulty and human consequences.

Book details

For the print edition listed above.

Publisher: Picador
Language: English
ISBN: 9781250076229

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