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Atul Gawande’s wise and courageous book raises the questions that none of us wants to think about. What will happen to our loved ones when they become too old or ill to care for themselves? What will the end of their lives, and ours, be like? Gawande practises surgery at a Boston hospital and is also professor in the department of surgery at Harvard Medical School. His parents, immigrants to America from India, were both doctors. With this background he might be expected to echo the opinions of the medical establishment. Instead, his book is a scathing indictment of the way modern medicine treats the old and the dying. Essentially his complaint is that medicine puts medical considerations first, and the rest nowhere. Keeping patients alive for as long as possible is its sole priority, and it has no views at all about what makes life worth living. In our society it is still quite usual for the elderly to be taken from their …