Being Mortal: Medicine And What Matters In The End - Plot & Excerpts
For all but our most recent history, death was a common, ever-present possibility. It didn’t matter whether you were five or fifty. Every day was a roll of the dice. If you plotted the typical course of a person’s health, it would look like this: Life and health would putter along nicely, not a problem in the world. Then illness would hit and the bottom would drop out like a trap door—the way it did for my grandmother Gopikabai Gawande, who’d been perfectly well until the day she was struck by a fatal case of malaria, not even thirty years old, or for Rich Hobson, who had a heart attack on a business trip and then was gone. Over the years, with medical progress, the bottom has tended to drop out later and later. The advent of sanitation and other public health measures sharply reduced the likelihood of death from infectious disease, especially in early childhood, and clinical advances dramatically reduced the mortality of childbirth and traumatic injuries. By the middle of the twentieth century, just four out of every hundred people in industrialized countries died before the age of thirty.
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