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Complications : a surgeon's notes on an imperfect science / Atul Gawande.

Gawande, Atul. (Author).

Summary:

A brilliant and courageous doctor reveals, in gripping accounts of true cases, the power and limits of modern medicine. Sometimes in medicine the only way to know what is truly going on in a patient is to operate, to look inside with one's own eyes. This book is exploratory surgery on medicine itself, laying bare a science not in its idealized form but as it actually is -- complicated, perplexing, and profoundly human. Atul Gawande 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 also shows us 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. Gawande offers a richly detailed portrait of the people and the science, even as he tackles the paradoxes and imperfections inherent in caring for human lives. 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.

Record details

  • ISBN: 0805063196
  • ISBN: 9780805063196
  • ISBN: 9780312421700
  • ISBN: 0312421702
  • Physical Description: x, 269 pages ; 22 cm
  • Edition: First edition
  • Publisher: New York : Picador, 2002.

Content descriptions

General Note:
"A Metropolitan book."
"Several of these pieces have appeared, in slightly different form, in the New Yorker and Slate"--T.p. verso.
Bibliography, etc. Note:
Includes bibliographical references (pages 253-264) and index.
Formatted Contents Note:
Pt. 1. Fallibility: Education of a knife -- The computer and the hernia factory -- When doctors make mistakes -- Nine thousand surgeons -- When good doctors go bad -- Pt. 2. Mystery: Full moon Friday the thirteenth -- The pain perplex -- A queasy feeling -- Crimson tide -- The man who couldn't stop eating -- Pt. 3. Uncertainty: Final cut -- The dead baby mystery -- Whose body is it anyway? -- The case of the red leg.
Subject: Gawande, Atul.
Surgeons > United States > Biography.
Surgery > Anecdotes.
Genre: Autobiographies.
Anecdotes.

Available copies

  • 22 of 23 copies available at NC Cardinal. (Show)
  • 3 of 3 copies available at Johnston County Affiliated Libraries.

Holds

  • 0 current holds with 23 total copies.
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Show Only Available Copies
Location Call Number / Copy Notes Barcode Shelving Location Status Due Date
Mary Duncan Public Library 617.092 Gaw (Text) 38950610915870 Adult Nonfiction Available -
Public Library of Johnston County and Smithfield 617.092 Gaw (Text) 38950608543544 Adult Nonfiction Available -
Selma Public Library BCD B GAWANDE (Text) 38950610389852 Adult Audiobook Available -