Complications A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science

The international bestseller from the author of Being Mortal In these gripping accounts of true cases, bestselling author Atul Gawande performs exploratory surgery on medicine itself, laying bare a science not in its idealised form, but as it actually is - complicated, perplexing and profoundly human. This is a stunningly well-written account of the life of a surgeon: what it is like to cut into people's bodies and the terrifying - literally life and death - decisions that have to be made: operations that go wrong; of doctors who go to the bad; why autopsies are necessary; what it feels like to insert your knife into someone. 'Written as tautly as a thriller' Observer