Being Mortal

Medicine extends life but at what cost to dignity and choice?

4.5/5 Goodreads · 225,034 ratings

282 pages

$18.99Save 5%

In stock. Also at Amazon or Bookshop.

Bookroo's summary

A surgeon confronts the harsh truths of modern medicine's approach to aging and death. As treatments extend life but compromise dignity, he explores how to ensure a fulfilling end. Can we find a balance between safety and autonomy, hope and reality? Through personal stories and research, this narrative challenges us to rethink how we approach life's final chapter, advocating for choices that honor the individual's journey.

From the publisher

Named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, The New York Times Book Review, NPR, and Chicago Tribune, now in paperback with a new reading group guide Medicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming the dangers of childbirth, injury, and disease from harrowing to manageable. But when it comes to the inescapable realities of aging and death, what medicine can do often runs counter to what it should. Through eye-opening research and gripping stories of his own patients and family, Gawande reveals the suffering this dynamic has produced. Nursing homes, devoted above all to safety, battle with residents over the food they are allowed to eat and the choices they are allowed to make. Doctors, uncomfortable discussing patients’ anxieties about death, fall back on false hopes and treatments that are actually shortening lives instead of improving them. In his bestselling books, Atul Gawande, a practicing surgeon, has fearlessly revealed the struggles of his profession. Here he examines its ultimate limitations and failures–in his own practices as well as others’–as life draws to a close. Riveting, honest, and humane, Being Mortal shows how the ultimate goal is not a good death but a good life–all the way to the very end.

At a glance