Being Mortal
Medicine and What Matters in the End
A surgeon confronts how modern medicine mishandles aging and dying, and argues that a good death means asking what makes life worth living.
Atul Gawande, a practising surgeon, turns to the questions medicine prefers to avoid: what happens when treatment can no longer fix us. Drawing on his patients, his own father’s decline, and the history of nursing homes and hospice, he shows how the medical default of doing everything often costs people the endings they actually want. The alternative starts with a harder conversation about what a good day looks like.
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