Book Review: What Atul Gawande's Newest Book Means for Breast Cancer Patients and Survivors

On reading the title of the book, Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance, and glancing at its cover, which pictures a gowned-up surgeon, you’d expect it to be a graphic exploration of surgery, a “you are there” treatment of what goes on in a typical hospital operating room. But, by the time you get through the introduction, you realize that this book, though it includes scattered accounts of actual surgery, is much, much more. It’s about what it takes -- besides a medical school diploma, brains, and a major amount of talent –- to be a truly good surgeon. And the characteristics author Atul Gawande outlines –- diligence, doing right, ingenuity, and the ability to change –- can be carried over into anyone’s career, and certainly into life after breast cancer.

Gawande, the modern definition of a Renaissance man, combines science and art in equal measures. A surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and a Harvard Medical School professor, he’s also a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine (where many of the essays in this book first appeared), and a 2006 MacArthur Fellow.

Related Video Interview: Dr. Atul Gawande on Medical Errors

Author Atul Gawande discusses who benefits from doctors being open and frank about their medical errors.

 

Atul Gawande's debut book, the New York Times best-seller Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science, looked at surgery, revealing that this critical part of medicine, rather than being populated by the god-like figures we imagine our doctors to be, is after all only as good as its very human surgeons. In Better, Gawande goes a step further, detailing the inner attributes, rather than the outward abilities, which make someone a truly brilliant surgeon.

On the Shelves of a Breast Cancer Survivor's Personal Library

Since receiving a breast cancer diagnosis in 2001, my library has expanded to include numerous books touching on the subject: Dr. Susan Love’s Breast Book, Hester Schnipper’s After Breast Cancer, and other favorites now populate an entire section in my bookshelves. Atul  Gawande's Better, while it doesn’t focus on breast cancer per se, is nevertheless a valuable addition to the collection of literature on the genre. While the primary focus of most cancer books is physical and practical, with perhaps a side trip into emotional issues, Better takes a whole new tack: looking at medicine in general (and breast cancer specifically, in a couple of instances) from a moral and ethical point of view, as it defines our personal standards of accountability.

The ethical issues Gawande examines aren’t so much tied to law (though that’s covered, too); but to the morals and ethics that become the personal compass by which we all live. Better isn’t a book about breast cancer; nor is it directed toward the layman, as it speaks mainly to doctors. But the lessons it illustrates, through a fascinating peek inside the world beyond the waiting room, apply to all of us. And as such, Better is a book that can resonate way beyond the medical community it covers.