Atul Gawande

“Nursing homes have come a long way from the firetrap warehouses of neglect they used to be. But it seems we've succumbed…

— Atul Gawande

I learned about a lot of things in medical school, but mortality wasn't one of them.

— Atul Gawande

No matter what measures are taken, doctors will sometimes falter, and it isn't reasonable to ask that we achieve perfection. What is…

— Atul Gawande

“Death, of course, is not a failure. Death is normal. Death may be the enemy, but it is also the natural order…

— Atul Gawande

George Orwell is a pinnacle writer, for his combination of moral insight and literary writing.

— Atul Gawande

This was not guilt: guilt is what you feel when you have done something wrong. What I felt was shame: I was…

— Atul Gawande

Are doctors who make mistakes villains? No, because then we all are.

— Atul Gawande

Arriving at an acceptance of one's mortality is a process, not an epiphany.

— Atul Gawande

We always hope for the easy fix: the one simple change that will erase a problem in a stroke. But few things…

— Atul Gawande

I chose surgery because I thought that perhaps this would make me more like the kind of person I wanted to be.

— Atul Gawande

“later she admitted that she’d taken a spill going down the wooden basement stairs. It was just a slip, she insisted. It…

— Atul Gawande

Outsiders tend to be the first to recognize the inadequacies of our social institutions. But, precisely because they are outsiders, they are…

— Atul Gawande

Practice is funny that way. For days and days, you make out only the fragments of what to do. And then one…

— Atul Gawande

“The brain gives us two ways to evaluate experiences like suffering—there is how we apprehend such experiences in the moment and how…

— Atul Gawande

I said there are at least two kinds of satisfaction, however, and the other has nothing to do with skill. It comes…

— Atul Gawande

I was never born to write. I was taught to write. And I am still being taught to write.

— Atul Gawande

Oliver Sacks remains my hero to this day. He was one of the first medical writers I read. The other was Lewis…

— Atul Gawande

The big thing that's happened is, in the time since the Affordable Care Act has been going on, our medical science has…

— Atul Gawande

We Have Medicalized Aging, and That Experiment Is Failing Us

— Atul Gawande

I talked to over two hundred patients and family members about their experiences with aging, serious illnesses, and the big unfixables. But…

— Atul Gawande

In one study, old people assigned to a geriatrics team stayed independent for far longer, and were admitted to the hospital less.

— Atul Gawande

“Home is the one place where your own priorities hold sway. At home, you decide how you spend your time, how you…

— Atul Gawande

“The progress of medicine and public health has been an incredible boon—people get to live longer, healthier, more productive lives than ever…

— Atul Gawande

We now live in the era of the super-specialist - of clinicians who have taken the time to practice at one narrow…

— Atul Gawande

“In other words, people who had substantive discussions with their doctor about their end-of-life preferences were far more likely to die at…

— Atul Gawande