Atul Gawande: Complications

Atul Gawande's 2002 book Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science is a collection of fourteen essays, many of them published in other places. Here's a quick rundown:

1. Education of a Knife: the practical problem of how to educate a future surgeon given that becoming a good surgeon requires literal hands-on experience
2. The Computer and the Hernia Factory: the value of experience, difficulty of diagnosis, and the value of specialization
3. When Doctor's Make Mistakes: medical errors and human factor engineering
4. Nine Thousand Surgeons: Gawande goes to a convention
5. When Good Doctors Go Bad: the need for and difficulties of self-regulation in the medical community
6. Full Moon Friday the Thirteenth: superstition among doctors and its basis in fact
7. The Pain Perplex: pain and the difficulty of treating it
8. A Queasy Feeling: vomiting, especially hyperemesis, and the difficulty of treating it effectively
9. Crimson Tide: treatments for debilitating blushing
10. The Man Who Couldn't Stop Eating: a successful gastric bypass operation and the difficulty of overcoming morbid obesity
11. Final Cut: autopsies and the fact that they're currently way out of style
12. The Dead Baby Mystery: sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) and infanticide
13. Whose Body Is It, Anyway?: the perils of informed consent and patient activism
14. The Case of the Red Leg: a freak diagnosis of necrotizing fasciitis

Despite the thicket of topics and the difficulty (and occasional unpleasantness) of some of the subject matter this was a brisk and engaging read. If I only had time for one essay I'd pick the one on medical mistakes, especially since this is a topic Gawande returns to in his later books. After that I'd probably pick the essays on bad doctors, informed consent, and gastric bypass, in that order.

I could almost have guessed from reading this book, but Gawande is a friend of Malcolm Gladwell, and they share an editor, Henry Finder. So far as I can tell Finder can spin straw into gold.

I've read twenty-two books so far this year and have three or four in progress. This is probably my second-favorite after Stefan Ulstein's 1995 oral history Growing Up Fundamentalist: Journeys in Legalism & Grace, of which more later.

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