Talks & Entertainment

Medicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming the dangers of childbirth, injury, and disease from harrowing to manageable. But when it comes to the inevitability of aging and death, what medicine can do often runs counter to what it should.

A practicing surgeon and recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, Atul Gawande fearlessly revealed the struggles of his profession through eye-opening research and gripping stories of his own patients and others in Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End.

Now in paperback, the #1 New York Times bestseller examines the limitations of medicine when it comes to the inescapable reality of one’s mortality. Nursing homes, devoted above all to safety, battle with residents over the food they are allowed to eat. Doctors, uncomfortable discussing patient’s anxieties about death, fall back on false hopes and treatments that are actually shortening lives instead of improving them. Being Mortal shows how the ultimate goal is not a good death but a good life – all the way to the very end.

Gawande is the author of Complications, Better, and The Checklist Manifesto. He is 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 Harvard School of Public Health. In conversation with Sarah Kliff, a health policy journalist who has spent seven years chronicling Washington’s battle over the Affordable Care Act. She is currently a senior policy correspondent at Vox. Book signing to follow.