Atul Gawande is one of the those writers I never miss. Writing in the Annals of Medicine in The New Yorker, he writes unforgettable articles that have illuminated the world of medicine for me like no one else. They "open up like an umbrella" said his New Yorker editor Henry Finder.
Some of my favorites are:
The Cost Conundrum
The Itch
The Checklist
The Way We Age Now
So I was quite interested in this profile on Atul Gawande in Harvard Magazine, Surgeon, Health Policy Scholar and Writer.
On the desk in his office at the Brigham is a framed copy of Sylvia Plath’s poem “The Surgeon at 2 a.m.” She describes a patient’s innards as “tubers and fruits/Oozing their jammy substances.” From the surgeon’s perspective, she writes: “I worm and hack in a purple wilderness.” Gawande notes that Plath, not a surgeon, nevertheless got things just right. “That,” he says, “is the really amazing thing, and that’s the difference between me and a real writer.”
He likes the Plath poem because it casts the surgeon in an ambiguous light. “Most writing about people in medicine casts them as either heroes or villains,” he says. “That poem captures the surgeon as a merely human, slightly bewildered, a little bit benighted person in a world that is ultimately beyond his control.”