4/5 stars
What's it about? Emergency room surgeon Atul Gawande reflects on the tension between the promise of medicine and the reality of death in this thoughtful ethical conversation. How can healthcare facilitate “a good death,” since we all have to go sometime?
How’d I find it? A grandmother’s shelf of books she left behind, telling me to take what I wanted. I kept the lion’s share.
Who will enjoy this book? If you like the fusion of memoir and health, try The In-Between by Hadley Vlahos or When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi.
What stood out? As a nurse, I loved Dr. Gawande’s moral wrestlings, as I encounter them frequently in my own practice. To cement his arguments, Gawande presents case studies from friends, family, and patients that make the stakes all the more real. Medicine can prolong our lives, sure, but at what cost? What do we lose when we resist our fate?
Which line made me feel something? The second chapter of Being Mortal drew me in, and this statement played no small part: “with our average life span in much of the world climbing past eighty years, we are already oddities living well beyond our appointed time. When we study aging what we are trying to understand is not so much a natural process as an unnatural one.”