Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, by Atul Gawande

[Aglaea]

I'm reading Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande for week "26. A book everyone is talking about". I'm not sure everyone is talking about it, but it was on a list I found when planning this challenge.

Synopsis, parts of it:
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.


I picked this book because of my professional background and since human life–and death–intrigues me greatly. The body is such an intricate and poetic machinery that it is almost unbelievable it could function at all. Today, we are detached from death since barely anyone dies in the home anymore, aging due to its messiness is something to hide away, and amidst our glorification of youth and beauty, death doesn't quite fit the illusion of a clean forever, does it. I'm not convinced that detachment is very healthy at all, and while I'm grateful for all the things medicine can do today, a situation is developing where we desperately cling to cures for everything under the sun, even when it would be time to let go. I've heard that many doctors in particular choose DNR when admitted to a hospital, but I'm not sure it is true.

In any case, after 14 minutes of listening to a pleasant voice, I'm here to encourage everyone to read or listen to this work, as I'm completely captivated already.

[Anastasia]

I am listening to this as an audiobook too. It is for the 2016 Discard Challenge -Medical Related Memoir prompt rather loosely interpreted.

[Anastasia]

This is a very important book. I highly recommend it to everyone. It poses questions about quality of life that can be applied at every stage of our lives wether it is the beginning, end or middle.

[Bana AZ]

I read this for 2018's week 16: A narrative nonfiction.
I've read The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right by the same author and enjoyed it, but I enjoyed Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End more. I guess it's because it has more emotion, which can't be helped, given the topic.

I love Gawande's insights and how he writes. Life is beautiful, but it doesn't last forever, and endings matter.

[Joanne]

I read this for Week 2. A book with one of the 5 W's in the title (Who, What, Where, When, Why)

The info in this book honestly feels life-changing and I can see myself rereading this book every decade or two for the rest of my life. 5 stars