Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science

by Atul Gawande

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780312421700
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	04/01/2003
Edition description:	REV
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	89,711
Product dimensions:	8.06(w) x 11.28(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Atul Gawande is the author of four 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.

Hometown:

Newton, Massachusetts

Date of Birth:

November 5, 1965

Place of Birth:

Brooklyn, New York

Education:

B.A.S., Stanford University, 1987; M.A., Oxford University, 1989; M.D., Harvard Medical School, 1995

Read an Excerpt

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.

Editorial Reviews

None surpass Gawande in the ability to create a sense of immediacy, in his power to conjure the reality of the ward, the thrill of the moment-by-moment medical or surgical drama. Complications impresses for its truth and authenticity, virtues that it owes to its author being as much forceful writer as uncompromising chronicler.” —The New York Times Book Review

“No one writes about medicine as a human subject as well as Atul Gawande. His stories about becoming a surgeon are scary, funny, absorbing....Complications is a uniquely soulful book about the science of mending bodies.” —Adam Gopnik, author of Paris to the Moon

“Gawande is arguably the best nonfiction doctor-writer around....He's prescient and thoughtful...the heir to Lewis Thomas' humble, insightful and brilliantly crafted oeuvre.” —Salon.com

“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

“Gawande is a writer with a scalpel pen and an X-ray eye.... He turns every case—from gunshot wounds to morbid obesity to flesh-eating bacteria—into a thriller in miniature. Diagnosis: riveting.” —Time

“Gawande's prose, much like the scalpel he wields, is precise, daring, but never reckless....Much like reading George Orwell, the reader emerges entertained, enlightened, transformed and immensely satisfied.” —Abraham Verghese, author of My Own Country

“Wrenching human tales...Gawande has pushed the medical yarn in a new direction.” —The Boston Globe

“Atul Gawande is a rare and wonderful storyteller who portrays his profession with bravery and humanity.” —Ellen Goodman, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist

“The stories in Complications are gripping medical mysteries that always have something extra. Gawande draws you in with the story but leaves you wiser about science, about health care issues, and even about the human condition.” —Michael Kinsley

From the Publisher