Book: Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect
Science
Author: Atul Gawande
Published: 2002 (Picador)
Pages: 252
This is a well-written collection of anecdotes that shows
just how mysterious working on the human body is. Dr. Gawande divides his
exploration of his profession’s failures into sections on human errors, weird
coincidences, and things medicine doesn’t have an answer for, but everything
overlapped and can’t be neatly divided and so the whole book ran a fluid
spectrum of why going to the hospital is scary.
But not, he never explicitly expresses but lets the
circumstances he describes say for themselves (hear that, fellow writers? It
works!), any more dangerous than all the other everyday experiences we put
ourselves in. Life is mysterious, and the only way we’re going to make things
better and get more answers is to let curious, compassionate people like him
poke around at it for awhile and fail and make things worse for a few people
before stumbling on the thing that makes things better for everyone else
afterwards.
Good details about procedures and how/why (if it’s known)
they work, just enough to picture exactly (too exactly…) what he’s doing but
not too much med talk to feel like a textbook at any point. He must have a really
good bedside manner with people he has to tell complicated stuff to.
Brave new world, eh? Bookshelf.
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