Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

#1 New York Times Bestseller

In Being Mortal, bestselling creator Atul Gawande tackles the hardest challenge of his profession: how medicine can not only support life but also the process of its ending

Medicine has triumphed in brand new times, transforming birth, injury, and infectious disease from harrowing to manageable. But in the inevitable condition of aging and death, the goals of medicine seem too often to run counter to the interest of the human spirit. Nursing homes, preoccupied with safety, pin patients into railed beds and wheelchairs. Hospitals isolate the dying, checking for necessary signs long after the goals of cure have change into moot. Doctors, committed to extending life, continue to carry out devastating procedures that in any case extend suffering.

Gawande, a practicing surgeon, addresses his profession’s ultimate limitation, arguing that quality of life is the desired goal for patients and families. Gawande offers examples of freer, more socially fulfilling models for assisting the infirm and dependent elderly, and he explores the varieties of hospice care to demonstrate that a person’s last weeks or months could also be wealthy and dignified.

Full of eye-opening research and riveting storytelling, Being Mortal asserts that medicine can comfort and support our experience even to the end, providing not only a good life but also a good end.