Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science

Gawande writes about the fallibility of medicine from the inside — the surgeon who has a bad day, the misdiagnoses that follow plausible logic, the complications that arise from the treatment. What makes this more unsettling than a malpractice anthology is his insistence that most errors are not acts of negligence but the inevitable product of a system that requires humans to do things humans cannot do perfectly.