Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance

Anomalies, head cases and the education of Atul Gawande

A A A Comments (0) By Gendy Alimurung Wednesday, Jun 6 2007

Gawande, who is a professor at Harvard Medical School and a general surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, had gone to India thinking he might have something to teach his counterparts, as a hotshot, young, U.S.-educated doctor. But it is he who gets an education. “What is your preferred technique for removing bladder stones?” one of the Nanded surgeons asks him.

“My technique,” Gawande says, “is to call a urologist.”

Photo/Illustration by Hedayatzadeh/Handsone

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Atul Gawande’s prose is uncluttered, elegant in a plainspoken way, even poetic at times. (He once said in an interview that he keeps a copy of Sylvia Plath’s poem “The Surgeon at 2 A.M.” taped to his office wall.) I blazed through Better in a single rapturous day. The narrative portrait that emerges is of a thoughtful, diligent and self-aware man, deeply in love with his profession, who even if he isn’t in possession of all the answers — isn’t entirely convinced that answers can be found — is nevertheless committed to searching for them. The heroes in Oliver Sacks’ classic works (like The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat) were his idiosyncratic patients, who struggled to overcome their diagnoses and function in a world that regarded them as broken. In Gawande’s mythology, the heroes are without a doubt the doctors, flawed as they are.

BETTER: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance | By ATUL GAWANDE | 288 pages | Metropolitan Books | $24 hardcover