The battle for medicine’s soul
Good medicine requires high-quality care and top-notch research. But it also requires a willingness to adapt, said Atul Gawande, a surgeon at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute who is also a staff writer for The New Yorker and a best-selling author. He spoke to a packed house at Sanders Theatre on Wednesday about “The Battle for the Soul of Medicine.” Sponsored by the Harvard Institute for Learning in Retirement (HILR), which is part of the Harvard Division of Continuing Education, Gawande delivered the Robert C. Cobb Memorial Lecture of 2011. Gawande, whose latest book is “The Checklist Manifesto,” suggested that the challenge of making health care both effective and affordable may be traced back to the discovery of a miracle drug: penicillin. “We were fooled by penicillin,” Gawande said. “It was so simple: just an injection. We came to expect that sort of miracle from medicine.” In modern...