In its September-October 2009 issue, Harvard Magazine has a profile of Dr. Atul Gawande, a surgeon who is best known in the public realm not for being a doctor but for being a regular contributor to The New Yorker. (He’s also a professor at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health, in addition to practicing surgery at Brigham & Women’s Hospital…you know, a complete slacker).
As a long-time reader of The New Yorker, I almost always enjoy his essays, though I wasn’t particularly enamored of his ideas for reforming the health care system that he outlined in this New York Times op-ed during the middle of this summer’s contentious health care “debate”. The basic idea — taking best-practice successes in both care and cost-management from around the country and making them the models for every hospital — is merely a step, not a solution, and continues to rely on a foundation of letting the insurance companies run the show. Of course, it was shouted right out of consideration by the right-wing whackjobs, like every other suggestion that wasn’t “Do NOTHING!!”, so I guess at this juncture it doesn’t matter.
The profile is pretty standard, but it does give you a picture of this man that you might not get from his own writing, plus a bunch of links to related articles and other interesting items about Dr. Gawande.
Oh, okay… just to make you feel better, here’s a gratuitous New Yorker cartoon:
Dear Harvey, Pete, Barry, Kevin, and every other weathermonkey on Boston-area TV: Enough is enough. The fucking blizzard was THIRTY-TWO YEARS AGO. It’s time to stop trotting out the same blurry videotape of cars stuck on Rt. 128 that is older than some of the people who are actually on your broadcast, just so we [...]
It’s going to be a long two months waiting for the iPad to actually ship so that all the tech bloggers and their hangers-on will stop writing so much speculative bullshit about iT and turn their attention iNstead to some other thing that’s going to Change Life As We Know iT. Since you cannot click [...]
Please, please, PUH-LEEZE stop talking about “What do we call the last decade?” Nobody could come up with an acceptable choice ten years ago, and nobody’s going to come up with one now. “Aughties” and “Naughties” are contrived and stupid, and so is the very idea that anything wraps up all nice and neatly into [...]
Gawande is the only “science writer” I’ve ever followed. He has a way of explaining things, and questioning them at the same time, that is both humane and engaging. Yeah, and he’s a slacker alright.