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A Surgeon's Notes on Performance
by Atul GawandeThis article relates to Better
Atul Gawande, a 2006 MacArthur
fellow, is a general surgeon at the
Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston,
a staff writer for The New Yorker,
an assistant professor at Harvard
Medical School, and a frequent
contributor to The New England
Journal of Medicine. He lives with
his wife and three children in Newton,
Massachusetts.
Both his parents were physicians his
father a urologist and his mother a
pediatrician and initially he resisted
following in their footsteps and instead
wanted to be a musician: "I wanted to be
a rock star. I played guitar and wrote
songs and even had a couple of club
shows. I was just terrible."
Attending Oxford on
a Rhodes scholarship he considered becoming a
philosopher until he realized he didn't
have the knack for asking the right sort
of philosophical questions, and so he
went to medical school after all. "It
turns out you can be a doctor and be
almost anything," he says. "Even a
writer." After Oxford he
worked in a
research laboratory and as an adviser to
the Clinton administration on health
policy before earning his M.D. in 1995.
He began contributing little pieces to
Slate about 10 years ago, while
still a resident. "Slate was
perfect for me," he explains, "because
it enabled me to fly under the radar. It
was just like going through surgical
residency. I did 30 columns for them,
and it was like doing 30 gallbladders.
Then I had to learn how to get
comfortable with 4,000-word and then
8,000-word essays for The New Yorker."
He now feels that writing is the most important thing he does: "In some ways, it's harder than surgery. But I do think I've found a theme in trying to understand failure and what it means in the world we live in, and how we can improve at what we do." More.
This "beyond the book article" relates to Better. It originally ran in April 2007 and has been updated for the February 2008 paperback edition. Go to magazine.
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