Browsing: ‘Better’

“Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passports, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.”

– Susan Sontag.

This quotation begins Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee’s Pulitzer Prize winning biography of cancer, ‘The Emperor of All Maladies.”

In this series we pay tribute to five physicians who preside over ‘the kingdom of the sick’ with not only their healing hands but their powerful words: Drs. Siddhartha Mukherjee, Atul Gawande, Abraham Verghese, Sanjay Gupta and Sandeep Jauhar.

So powerful is Dr. Atul Gawande’s writing that Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s partner, sent him a $20,000 check without ever having met him, after reading ‘The Cost Conundrum’ his piece about healthcare in The New Yorker, the Huffington Post reports.

Gawande, being Gawande, did not accept the check personally but donated it to Brigham and Women’s Hospital Center for Surgery and Public Health for an international project.
Gawande’s passion and commitment comes through in his latest book.