Atul Gawande: Complications

Reviewed by MARGIE THOMSON

Gawande wrote this book near the end of his eight years training in general surgery in the United States, and is his attempt to peel back the layers on his own chosen profession.

Medicine is, he says "a strange and in many ways disturbing business. The stakes are high, the liberties taken tremendous ... What you find when you get in close, however - close enough to see the furrowed brows, the doubts and mis-steps, the failures as well as the successes - is how messy, uncertain and also surprising medicine turns out to be."

He writes with a wonderful clarity and honesty, unafraid to speak of his own experiences of failure or uncertainty when training - "the most important talent," he says, "may be the talent for practice itself," and he makes the possibly disturbing point that surgeons are on a continuous learning curve, practising on real humans, of course.

Doctors are flawed beings like the rest of us, and he examines why some "go bad".

He shows what happens when medicine comes up against the inexplicable, and he waxes lyrical about the mysteries and importance of intuition. A wonderful book for all corners of the medical world.

(Profile, $49.95)