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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. How does Gawande characterize the people who spend the last days of their life in the ICU?

2. What does Gawande say is the “third type of doctor-patient relationship” (201)?

3. What did Gawande see stacked along the river bank when he and his guide set out to dispose of his father’s ashes?

4. What does Gawande say doctors have to do as people get closer to death?

5. What does Gawande say Josiah Royce described as the heart of a meaningful life?

Short Essay Questions

1. What does Gawande say was the mistake his father made in his medical care?

2. What effect did Thomas’ changes have on the residents?

3. What does Gawande say goes into a “comfort pack” (162)?

4. What is the cause that Gawande says Josiah Royce described as keeping people engaged in their lives?

5. What triumph of Gawande’s was Gawande’s father able to witness, in his declining health?

6. What does Daniel Kahneman’s research tell Gawande about painful experiences?

7. How did Gawande and his mother differ on the question of how to handle Gawande’s father’s care as death came closer?

8. What are the instructions Gawande’s father left, for the disposal of his remains?

9. How does Gawande describe what the real job of people in medicine should be?

10. What technique does Atul Gawande learn from a palliative care physician, and use with Jewel Douglass?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Think about how you would like your own life to end. What decisions can you make today that will make “a good death” a likely outcome of your decisions? In what ways does our culture encourage this kind of thinking? In what ways does it distract from it? Where are the “good life” and “good death” valued?

Essay Topic 2

What are the emotions Gawande’s book makes you feel, and how do those emotions affect you? Do they make you want to take action, or avoid action? What stories do you tell yourself to protect yourself from the harder emotions in Gawande’s narrative?

Essay Topic 3

What are the key omissions in Being Mortal? Where is Gawande missing key points about Americans’ experiences of death and dying? How do class or gender change Gawande’s narrative? How do different peoples within America experience different realities than the story Gawande tells?

(see the answer keys)

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