Gawande Juggles Pen and Scalpel

From the Harvard Medical School (HMS) Quad to the White House lawn, Atul A. Gawande has tried his hand at prose composition, policy-making, and patient care.

When he approaches the podium Thursday as the HMS Class Day speaker, Gawande will be looking down at the place where he sat 10 years ago, listening to the speaker on his own Class Day.

Gawande graduated from HMS in 1995 after a political stint in the Clinton White House. Today, he’s an Assistant Professor of Surgery at HMS and an Assistant Professor in Health Policy and Management at the Harvard School of Public Health (SPH). Primarily a cancer surgeon, he also serves as associate surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital’s Dana Farber Cancer Institute.

He’s pursued a writing career, too, as an author and staff writer on science and medicine for The New Yorker since 1998.

Known for his patient-centered approach to medicine, Gawande has used his experience in the operating room to write of the trials and tribulations of being a surgeon. At 39, he will be one of the youngest HMS Class Day speakers ever.

RULES OF THE GAME

This Thursday, in a speech titled “Five Rules,” Gawande says he hopes to encourage graduates to make a difference in the burgeoning world of medicine.

His speech will advise graduates about working as part of the current medical workforce of one million physicians, three million nurses, and hundreds of thousands of lab technicians and nutritionists, he says.

“My rules are rules for survival but also rules for being a good doctor and a good human being,” he says.

Gawande says he wants to promote the fusion of a humanist approach and scientific training.

Explaining the importance of this two-pronged method, Gawande says it’s important “to actually connect in a human way with the people around you, and to know the people you work with, or who come to you for care.”

Those who know Gawande describe him as a role model for aspiring medical practitioners.

“He really listens and is interested in the people who come before him,” says Sara Bershtel, the associate publisher of Metropolitan Books, which produces Gawande’s books. “I suppose that’s a very good thing to value when you’re speaking to people who are about to work in medicine.”

BALANCING ACT

Gawande’s writing applies both his academic and professional experience to examine the world of medicine.

“I try to work out why medicine remains with so many imperfections,” Gawande says, “what we can do to make them better, and what the experience is like of both practicing medicine and being someone who has to be cured for by a system that will always be imperfect.”

His book “Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science” was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2002.

Gawande’s publishers say his work takes on prominent questions in unconventional ways.

“He is willing to ask questions that might seem obvious but they have complicated and informative answers,” Bershtel says.

And, according to Bershtel, sustaining a career as a writer requires Gawande to find a balance with his medical commitments.

“Often with authors you say to them, ‘You have to drop everything else and work on this book, I’m sure whatever else you’re doing isn’t a matter of life and death,’” Bershtel says. “But in his case, it was!”

‘PROFESSIONAL DILETTANTE’

Born and raised in Ohio to Indian parents, Gawande studied Biology and Political Science at Stanford University as an undergraduate, earned his masters degree at Oxford University, and attended HMS and SPH.

And he took a year off during medical school to serve as a senior adviser for health policy in the Clinton administration. It was in Washington that Gawande got an insider’s look into “the battles of trying to actually reform the health care system.” Today, he describes the endeavor as a failure—“a very trying experience with many lessons learned.”

Gawande says his mother-in-law likes to call him a “professional dilettante”—a title he embraces. Those who know Gawande say his expansive dabbling will enable him to contribute something unique in his Thursday speech.

“Given his broad horizon and the depth of his experience—working in the White House in health-care policy and in the trenches at an acute-care hospital—he has an extraordinary perspective that covers the depth and breadth of the field of medicine,” says Anthony D. Whittemore, Chief Medical Officer at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and HMS Professor of Surgery. “That puts him in a unique position to describe the whole spectrum of opportunities available in health care.”

—Staff writer Lulu Zhou can be reached at luluzhou@fas.harvard.edu.