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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. What does Gawande say is most important about the end of Jewel Douglas’ story?

2. How does Gawande say he answered when his patient’s family asked if his patient was dying?

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

4. How does Gawande characterize the phase of cultural development we are in, with regard to care for the sick and dying?

5. What does Gawande say being mortal is about?

Short Essay Questions

1. How do Gawande’s father’s two doctors approach his condition differently?

2. How does Gawande say that end-of-life care costs affect the American medical system?

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

4. What are the priorities Gawande says people have, at the end of their lives, that go beyond “prolonging their lives” (155)?

5. What compromises does Gawande make, to give Jewel Douglass a “palliative operation” (240)?

6. How does Gawande characterize his faith in his people’s religion, and how does he describe his participation in the Hindu ritual for dispersing his father’s remains?

7. In the metaphor of death as the enemy, which general’s philosophy does Gawande say patients should want to emulate?

8. What was Bill Thomas’ idea for bringing more self-reliance to the residents of Chase Memorial?

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

10. What definition of courage does Gawande arrive at, from his discussion of Plato’s Laches dialogue?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

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?

Essay Topic 2

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 3

When is Being Mortal most itself? What is its characteristic passage, or moment? What makes that moment or passage the most representative of the book as a whole? Are there any places where the book seems to depart from its typical self, as if to become a different book?

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