Complications is a fascinating and often harrowing exploration of life and death in our most highly technical, yet still human enterprise. Atul Gawande takes us through the world of surgery, where constant pressure to deliver more and more results from our medicalized world means that too little time is left for ongoing learning and reflection.

In this masterful collection of essays, Gawande asks what it means to be a disciple of modern medicine: How should doctors practice? What are their responsibilities? How many lives are irrevocably changed? And how do we even define “good patient care?” The result is a mind-bending series of analyses and descriptions that will forever change how you look at doctors, hospitals, and medicine.

In Complications, surgeon and writer Atul Gawande plumbs the depths of a practice that has become more complex and testy by the day. Confronting medical mishaps in hospitals and other facilities and exploring the social and economic pressures on medicine today, he shows us how those who practice it face moral dilemmas as great as any faced by doctors of yore.

About Complications Book

In gripping accounts of true cases, surgeon Atul Gawande explores medicine’s power and limits, offering an unflinching view from the scalpel’s edge. Complications lays bare a science not in its idealized form but as it is–uncertain, perplexing, and profoundly human.

Gawande’s writing is imbued with an infectious passion for the field, from his first-person account of operating on a patient whose kidneys are failing to his description of how surgeons supported themselves as they were learning how to operate. The results are admirable–his resolute illustrations of the work and its successes evoke awe more often than they don’t.