Gawande - Complications

Those who believe, as many of us need to at some time in our lives, that doctors know best will not be pleased to read Atul Gawandes book. But any Briton brought up on the folk-legends of Doctor in the House will be unsurprised at its revelations: surgery is unpredictable; sometimes a doctor acts on a hunch he cant logically justify, and turns out to be right; diseases run in fashions; surgeons can go to pieces, drink, lose their nerve, foul things up.

Michael Bywater, Telegraph Arts and Books

With outstanding honesty Complications recognises the need for doctors as well as patients to acknowledge the limits of medical science without losing their trust in themselves, or each other. Herald

Engaging, a breath of fresh air Without lecturing us, by the sole expedient of telling us fascinating stories, Gawande leads us to ponder the knotty philosophical riddles enmeshed in the very nature of disease Complications impresses for its truth and authenticity, virtues that it owes to its author being as much forceful writer as uncompromising chronicler. New York Times Book Review

This book is just what the doctor ordered Gawande is a bright spark, too. At other times I have been a laboratory scientist, a public health researcher, a student of philosophy and ethics, and a health policy adviser in government. What this CV omits is the fact that hes also a very good writer and when he writes about medicine he does so superbly. Patrick Gilmore, Ham and High

Gawande is a writer with a scalpel pen and an X-ray eye A surgical resident himself, he turns every case into a thriller in miniature. Diagnosis: riveting.

Time Magazine

Gawande is arguably the best nonfiction doctor-writer around and this collection showcases his work well. Hes prescient and thoughtful humble, insightful and brilliantly crafted. Dr. Ivan Oransky, Salon

Complications, by the surgeon Atul Gawande, is an excellent and terribly shocking book about the fact that surgeons are all too human. William Leith, TheYearsBest Reads, Evening Standard.

No one writes about medicine as a human subject as well as Atul Gawande. His stories about becoming a surgeon are scary, funny, absorbing, and always touched with both a tender conscientiousness and an alert, hyper-intelligent skepticism. He captures, as no one else has, the doubleness of doctoring: what it feels like to see other people as fascinating, intricate, easily breakable machines and, at the same time, as mirror images of ones own self. Complications is a uniquely soulful book about the science of mending bodies. Adam Gopnik, author of Paris to the Moon

Complications is a book about medicine that reads like a thriller. Every subject Atul Gawande touches is probed and dissected and turned inside out with such deftness and feeling and counterintuitive insight that the reader is left breathless.

Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point

Dr Gawande insists upon what should always have been obvious: that doctors have to act, and act dramatically, in the absence of definitive knowledge. Sometimes this leads to tragedy, sometimes to triumph. His book, not surprisingly, ends with an account of a triumph rather than a disaster: appropriately enough, for with all its deficiencies and all the carping of its critics, medicine is a noble enterprise. Complications will help to convince the lay reader of this increasingly unacknowledged truth. Anthony Daniels, Sunday Telegraph

Gawandes revelation of life behind the surgical mask should shatter our nave preconceptions for good. Graham Ball, Sunday Express

Gawande casts himself as a guide, holding a lantern across the divide between patient and physician. Economist

Atul Gawande offers one intriguing route to medical salvation nothing less than a complete reinvention of the covenant between patient and doctor Instead of praising the scientific victories that most practitioners of Western medicine would like us to celebrate, Gawande shows that medicine is, at best, an imperfect science. Richard Horton, The Times

Complications

Atul Gawande is one of the worlds most distinguished doctors. A 2006 MacArthur Fellow, he is a general surgeon at the Brigham and Womens Hospital in Boston, a staff writer for the New Yorker, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and the author of Better: ASurgeonsNotes onPerformance, also published by Profile. He lives with his wife and children in Newton, Massachusetts.

Complications

A Surgeons Notes on an Imperfect Science

Atul Gawande