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Being mortal: medicine and what matters in the end atul gawande

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Atul Gawande is the author of three bestselling books: Complications, a finalist for the National Book Award; Better, selected by Amazon.com as one of the ten best books of 2007; and The Checklist Manifesto. He is also a surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1998, and a professor at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health. He has won two National Magazine Awards, a MacArthur Fellowship, and been named one of the world's hundred most influential thinkers by Foreign Policy and TIME. In his work as a public health researcher, he is Director of Ariadne Labs a joint center for health system innovation. And he is also co-founder and chairman of Lifebox, a global not-for-profit implementing systems and technologies to reduce surgical deaths globally. He and his wife have three children and live in Newton, Massachusetts. You can find more at http://www.atulgawande.com.

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Behind US surgeon Atul Gawande’s success is the incredible journey of his Indian immigrant parents

The Indian-American doctor Atul Gawande wears a lot of different hats: surgeon, staff writer for the New Yorker, best-selling author, and MacArthur Genius. Now, he’s also been named the CEO of a new non-profit health care venture launched by Amazon, JP Morgan, and Berkshire Hathaway.

But when he was younger, Gawande wasn’t at all convinced about following in the footsteps of his immigrant parents by going into medicine.

“It’s almost a given that the children of two Indian immigrant doctors are expected to be doctors themselves...In many ways, I spent a lot of time trying to escape that,” he said in an interview with Boston Magazine last year.

Nevertheless, today Gawande is almost a household name, and his articles and books on health care and medicine are widely read around the world, including India. Less know, however, is the incredible journey of his parents, part of a pioneering generation of Indian immigrants who built a new life in the US.

The back story

Atmaram Gawan

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Transcription by Alletta Cooper

Krista Tippett: We are strange creatures. It’s hard for us to speak about, let in, the reality of frailty and death — the elemental fact of mortality itself. In this century, Western medicine has gradually moved away from its understanding of death as a failure where care stops. Hospice has moved from something rare to something expected. And yet, advances in technology make it ever harder for physicians and patients to make a call to stop fighting death — often at the expense of the quality of the last time of life.

Meanwhile, there is a new longevity industry, which resists the very notion of decline, much less finitude. Fascinatingly, the simple question which transformed the surgeon Atul Gawande’s life and his practice of medicine is this: What does a good day look like? As he has come to see, standing reverently before our mortality is an exercise in more intricately inhabiting why we want to be alive. This conversation evokes both grief and hope. Sadness at so many deaths — including our species-level losses to Covid — that have not allo