Medical advance has been startling in the past half-century. To give only one example, more or less at random: if the techniques of resuscitation and trauma surgery that were available in 1960 were still in use today, our homicide rate would be three to five times higher than it is (and it is two or three times higher than it was in 1960 nonetheless).
Atul Gawande is a surgeon at one of the world’s greatest surgical centres, the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. As such, he is committed to medicine’s noblest ideal, the dedication of science to the cure of disease. It seems almost unfair that he should also be a gifted writer with an ability to tell medical anecdotes whose dénouement the reader awaits with suspense. He writes much better than most people who live by their pen.
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