Want to learn the ideas in Complications better than ever? Read the world’s #1 book summary of Complications by Atul Gawande here.
Read a brief 1-Page Summary or watch video summaries curated by our expert team. Note: this book guide is not affiliated with or endorsed by the publisher or author, and we always encourage you to purchase and read the full book.
Video Summaries of Complications
We’ve scoured the Internet for the very best videos on Complications, from high-quality videos summaries to interviews or commentary by Atul Gawande.
1-Page Summary of Complications
Overall Summary
Atul Gawande’s Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science is a collection of essays that weaves narratives from Gawande’s personal experience as a surgical resident together with research, philosophy, and case studies in medicine. Published in 2002, Complications became a 2002 National Book Award Finalist for Nonfiction. The book was written by Atul Gawande, who is also the author of three other books on medicine and has written for The New Yorker and Slate.
This book is divided into three sections: Fallibility, Mystery, and Uncertainty. The first section discusses mistakes in medicine and how to deal with them. In the first essay of this section Gawande talks about his experience learning a new procedure on the job.
Technology is constantly changing the way we diagnose patients and perform operations. In “The Computer and the Hernia Factory,” Gawande discusses a hospital that was specifically designed for hernia operations. The results were impressive, showing how technology can be used to streamline processes in medicine. However, he also points out that computers aren’t necessarily better than humans when it comes to diagnosis; they’re just different tools at our disposal—humans are still needed as part of the process. He makes this point by discussing another computer program that does EKGs (electrocardiograms) better than doctors do them themselves.
In “When Doctors Make Mistakes,” Gawande looks at error in medicine from a data-driven perspective; he reveals flawed processes hospitals use to address mistakes and looks toward anesthesiology as a model for reducing errors through careful analysis of what went wrong during an operation or treatment plan gone awry.
In “Nine Thousand Surgeons,” Gawande describes his first trip to a medical convention. He also looks at doctors who are attending the convention and portrays them as people like everyone else. Doctors can be distracted by flashy displays just like anyone else would be at any other type of convention. In “When Good Doctors Go Bad,” he examines why some doctors do bad things and how they end up doing these bad things.
In the second part of this book, Gawande examines medical mysteries in an attempt to solve them. He looks at superstition and how it affects emergency room patients on Friday the 13th. In another chapter, he presents a case study of a patient with mysterious back pain and discusses why new ideas about pain are needed.
In this essay, Gawande explores the many causes of nausea and how it can be treated. He also looks at blushing, asking why people blush and what personality traits are associated with blushing. The final essay in Part 2 examines patients who underwent gastric bypass surgery to lose weight.
Part 3 exposes areas in medicine where there is a lack of knowledge. The essay “Final Cut” discusses misdiagnosis, and the essay “The Dead Baby Mystery” explains sudden infant death syndrome as a blanket diagnosis covering all manner of inexplicable infant deaths.
“Whose Body Is It, Anyway?” discusses the relationship between patients and doctors. Doctors have to make decisions about what’s best for their patients, but some times it is difficult because they don’t know everything and can make mistakes. In “The Case of the Red Leg,” Gawande uses a story about a patient with an extremely rare disease to discuss how doctors are unsure of themselves sometimes and that they still try to help people despite this uncertainty.
Essay 1: “Education of a Knife”
In “Education of a Knife,” Gawande introduces the idea that surgeons learn through practice. They are trained in school and then they get to work on real patients. However, there is a downside to this—surgeons need to practice their skills on real people and not just cadavers or mannequins. This creates tension because it means that sometimes novice surgeons will mess up while practicing new techniques on live patients. In this essay, Gawande tracks his ability over time to perform one procedure: putting a central line in a patient’s chest (a tube going into the heart for food or medicine). At first he struggles with this skill but eventually gets better at it as he gains more experience and confidence. The essay culminates when Gawande turns from student to teacher by assigning the task of placing a central line into an inexperienced resident’s hands so that she can gain some experience.
