Being Mortal

Atul Gawande

Hamish Hamilton

296 pages, Rs. 599

Doctors are trained to keep their patients alive as long as possible, but are never taught how to prepare people to die. And yet for many patients, particularly the old and terminally ill, death is as much a question of how as of when. Should the medical profession rethink its approach to them? Atul Gawande argues that an acceptance of mortality must lie at the centre of the way we treat the dying; the result is a work that is an extraordinary account of loss.