Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
byAtul Gawande
Being Mortal is a powerful, eye-opening and empathetically written book about how we struggle to cope with the constraints of our biology, with the limits set by genes and cells and flesh and bone. We aren't are properly equipped and prepped to handle end of life decides for ourselves or loved ones. Medical Science has progressed tremendously to expand our life span, but the quality of our lives still diminish dramatically; keeping the body alive and destroying other things in the process. The book talks about alternative methods of care and how we can better manage life and think about living and dying on our own terms.
Motivations to Read
I've been thinking deeply about the psychology and philosophy around death. The book, "The Denial of Death", deeply influenced me and I feel accepting the inevitability of death and having emotional maturity to prepare and manage the situation when the time comes for someone close to us and well as ourselves is an important life skill.
3 Reasons to Read
- How can medicine not only improve life, but help us manage the end of life process.
- 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 may be rich and dignified.
- Stories to build more compassion and empathy for the elderly and ways to build more human support services for them
Notable Quotes
“Being mortal is about the struggle to cope with the constraints of our biology, with the limits set by genes and cells and flesh and bone. Medical science has given us remarkable power to push against these limits, and the potential value of this power was a central reason I became a doctor. But again and again, I have seen the damage we in medicine do when we fail to acknowledge that such power is finite and always will be. We've been wrong about what our job is in medicine. We think our job is to ensure health and survival. But really it is larger than that. It is to enable well-being. And well-being is about the reasons one wishes to be alive. Those reasons matter not just at the end of life, or when debility comes, but all along the way. Whenever serious sickness or injury strikes and your body or mind breaks down, the vital questions are the same: What is your understanding of the situation and its potential outcomes? What are your fears and what are your hopes? What are the trade-offs you are willing to make and not willing to make? And what is the course of action that best serves this understanding?” Atul Gawande
“You may not control life's circumstances, but getting to be the author of your life means getting to control what you do with them.” Atul Gawande
“In the end, people don't view their life as merely the average of all its moments—which, after all, is mostly nothing much plus some sleep. For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. A story has a sense of a whole, and its arc is determined by the significant moments, the ones where something happens. Measurements of people's minute-by-minute levels of pleasure and pain miss this fundamental aspect of human existence. A seemingly happy life maybe empty. A seemingly difficult life may be devoted to a great cause. We have purposes larger than ourselves.” Atul Gawande
“A few conclusions become clear when we understand this: that our most cruel failure in how we treat the sick and the aged is the failure to recognize that they have priorities beyond merely being safe and living longer; that the chance to shape one's story is essential to sustaining meaning in life; that we have the opportunity to refashion our institutions, our culture, and our conversations in ways that transform the possibilities for the last chapters of everyone's lives.” Atul Gawande
“Our ultimate goal, after all, is not a good death but a good life to the very end.” Atul Gawande
“We've been wrong about what our job is in medicine. We think our job is to ensure health and survival. But really it is larger than that. It is to enable well-being.” Atul Gawande
Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End Notes & Summary
