Atul Gawande
Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science

Rabb Lecture Hall
Boston Public Library
700 Boylston Street, Boston
no tickets -- free to public

Atul Gawande, a surgical resident at a hospital in Boston and a staff writer on medicine and science for The New Yorker who received his M.D. from Harvard Medical School and an M.P.H. from the Harvard School of Public Health, offers an unflinching view from the scalpel's edge, where science is ambiguous, information is limited, the stakes are high, yet decisions must be made. In dramatic and revealing stories of patients and doctors, he explores how deadly mistakes occur and why good surgeons go bad. He shows what happens when medicine comes up against the inexplicable: an architect with incapacitating back pain for which there is no physical cause; a young woman with nausea that won't go away; a television newscaster whose blushing is so severe that she cannot do her job. And in a richly detailed portrait of both the people and the science, Gawande also ponders the human factor that makes saving lives possible.

At once tough-minded and humane, Complications is a new kind of medical writing, nuanced and lucid, unafraid to confront the conflicts and uncertainties that lie at the heart of modern medicine, yet always alive to the possibilities of wisdom in this extraordinary endeavor.