Chinmay Arun Damle
chinmaydamle@yahoo.com
Dr. Atul Gawande's patients regard him as the Asclepios. In the medical field, he is a leading expert on the removal of cancerous endocrine glands. He has been named as one of the 20 Most Influential South Asians by Newsweek Magazine. His gift for dulcet prose has made him to be recognized as a successful writer. The storied tale of his success, consecrated into a legend, is so inspiring that it has forever changed the image of Indians in the United States.
He is the son of Indian immigrants, both doctors. His father runs a urology practice in Athens, Ohio (where Atul and his sister both grew up), and his mother is a pediatrician. He obtained an undergraduate degree from Stanford University in 1987, was a Rhodes Scholar (earning a P.P.E. degree from Balliol College, Oxford in 1989), and later graduated from Harvard Medical School. He also has a Master of Public Health degree from the Harvard School of Public Health. He is a general and endocrine surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, an assistant professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, and an assistant professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School. He has written extensively on medicine and public health for The New Yorker magazine and the online magazine Slate. He has also written for New England Journal of Medicine. His essays have appeared in The Best American Essays 2002 and The Best American Science Writing 2002. His book, Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science was a National Book Award finalist. In 2006 he received the MacArthur Fellowship, popularly known as the "genius prize," for the "fresh and unique perspective, clarity, and intuition" in his written work and his "energetic and imaginitive" approach to finding practical ways to improve surgical practice. His new book, Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance, was released in April 2007.
Gawande, a surgeon by occupation and an essayist by avocation, has a wonderful gift of telling true tales that bring to life the issues at stake in the human endeavor of healing. He has succeeded in putting a human face on controversial topics like malpractice and global disparities in medical care, while taking an unflinching look at his own failings as a doctor. He is a great believer in competition and believes that the performance of doctors and hospitals should be routinely compared and that their rankings should be made public. He strongly feels that a change in attitude is absolutely necessary to make medicine more efficient, and better.
Dr. Gawande lives in Newton, Massachusetts and has three children.