Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science - Softcover

Gawande, Atul

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312421702 ISBN 13: 9780312421700

Publisher: Metropolitan Books, 2003

Synopsis

In gripping accounts of true cases, surgeon Atul Gawande explores the power and the limits of medicine, offering an unflinching view from the scalpel's edge. Complications lays bare a science not in its idealized form but as it actually is―uncertain, perplexing, and profoundly human.

Complications is a 2002 National Book Award Finalist for Nonfiction.

About this title

About the Author

Atul Gawande is the author of several bestselling books: Complications, a finalist for the National Book Award; Better; The Checklist Manifesto, and Being Mortal. He is also a surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, a staff writer for The New Yorker, and a professor at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health. He has won the Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science, a MacArthur Fellowship, and two National Magazine Awards. In his work in public health, he is Founder and Chair of Ariadne Labs, a joint center for health systems innovation, and Lifebox, a nonprofit organization making surgery safer globally. He is also chair of Haven, where he was CEO from 2018-2020. He and his wife have three children and live in Newton, Massachusetts.

Reviews

Surgeon, MacArthur fellow, and New Yorker staff writer Gawande follows his best-sellers Complications (2002) and Better (2007) with an electrifying manifesto that pairs the most advanced medical science with the humblest of tools: the checklist. Concerned about medical mistakes, an array of which Gawande describes in dramatic passages guaranteed to raise your blood pressure, Gawande investigated the nature of ineptitude and found that the more complex our lives and work become—a raging side effect of technology—the easier it is for us to overlook details and to err, sometimes catastrophically. Hence the well-thought-out to-do list. Overwhelming torrents of details and demands are by no means restricted to medicine. In fact, Gawande discovered the power of the checklist in his research into aviation, and he extends his inquiry to architecture, finance, and legal cases. Back on his turf, Gawande credits nurses with creating the first health checklists and describes his own quest to make and properly use a safe-surgery checklist. With numerous tales from the front and striking anatomies of cognition and distraction, Gawande’s back-to-basics credo is invaluable. --Donna Seaman

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Complications

A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect ScienceBy Atul Gawande

Picador USA

Copyright ©2002 Atul Gawande
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780312421700
When you are in the operating room for the first time and see the surgeon press his scalpel to someone's body, you either shudder in horror or gape in awe. I gaped. It wasn't the blood and guts that enthralled me. It was the idea that a mere person would ever have the confidence to wield that scalpel. I wondered how the surgeon knew that all the steps would go as planned, that bleeding would be controlled and organs would not be injured. He didn't, but still he cut.

Later, I was allowed to make an incision myself. The surgeon drew a six-inch dotted line across the patient's abdomen and then, to my surprise, had the nurse hand me the knife. It was, I remember, still warm. I put the blade to the skin and cut. The experience was odd and addictive, mixing exhilaration, anxiety, a righteous faith that operating was somehow beneficial, and the slightly nauseating discovery that it took more force than I realized. The moment made me want to be a surgeon -- someone with the assurance to proceed as if cutting were routine.




Continues...

Excerpted from Complicationsby Atul Gawande Copyright ©2002 by Atul Gawande. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Metropolitan Books
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0312421702
• ISBN 13: 9780312421700
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 269