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1. How does Gawande describe his exposure to training about mortality in medical school?

Gawande says that he was not trained in issues surrounding mortality, except for one hour when his colleagues discussed Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych, in which Ivan Ilych declines and dies without getting much sympathy from those around him. Gawande says that he put the story out of his head, but once he was in practice, and saw the decisions his patients had to make, he realized how unprepared he was to help them answer the human questions of how to handle mortality.

2. How does Gawande characterize Ivan Ilych’s experience of dying?

Gawande says that Ilych was a successful civil servant who fell ill, and wanted someone “to pity him as a sick child is pitied,” but his chief torment comes from the fact that his “doctors, friends or family” cannot handle the fact of his death in what Gawande describes as a “failure of character and culture” (2).

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