Atul Gawande

     

 This week I am posting about Atul Gawande.  Like always, I came across Gawande at Borders (a company I will always remain loyal to).  As a general and endocrine surgeon in Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, an associate professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, an associate professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School, contrbutor to The New Yorker, a former Rhodes scholar, and MacArthur fellow, Dr. Atul Gawande's scholarship is highly credible.  

At the same time, I find Gawande very accessible and enjoyable for both physicians and patients.  When I think of Gawande, I think of a very sobering writer, a surprising feat given the topics he sometimes covers including the U.S. healthcare system and medical error.  In some ways, I would guess that Gawande writes like he talks to his patients: he presents the facts and the situation and gives his most educated opinion without being inflammatory.  It is very comforting to find such journalism in our era of pundits and "news" shows.

I was lucky enough to get to hear Dr. Gawande lecture at the Cleveland Clinic a few months ago.  The focus was on the U.S. healthcare system.  I will always remember what he said on the complexity of medicine and how we were all "fooled by penicillin."  Penicillin was not the quick-fix end of infectious disease.  There will be no quick-fix for the healthcare in the United States.       

In his first collection of essays for The New Yorker, Gawande focuses on the humanity of doctors and the degree of uncertainty they must deal with while lives are on the line.  This is some of the best medical writing out there, this book was a National Book Award finalist.  In his second collection of essays, Atul Gawande writes in the same vein of fellow The New Yorker contributor, Jerome Groopman, in the performance of a physician and issues in medical practice at home and abroad.  Gawande’s sincerity and thoughtfulness in the stories he tells and perspectives he gives does not change in his follow-up book.