单项选择题

案例分析题

The two books, Final Exam: A Surgeon’s Reflections on Mortality by Pauline Chen, and Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance by Atul Gawande, are remarkably honest and human accounts, both describing professional moments of fear, guilt, embarrassment and humor. The two authors, both Harvard-educated surgeons, admit to cases of personal failure and call on their fellow medics to reflect continuously on how they can improve the way their profession is practiced. Pauline Chen’s project is a discussion of appropriate end-of-life care. She probes into the question of why surgeons can seem unfeeling and slowly teases apart the answer that it is brought about by a doctor’s training. In her view, medical students should learn to trivialize death enough to cope but humanize it enough to help, and their formal education caters disproportionately to the former. Atul Gawande is more interested in behavioral tendencies than emotional ones. His is wider in scope and richer in fascinating detail. A staff writer for the New Yorker as well as a 2006 MacArthur "genius" grant recipient for his research, Dr. Gawande reports on the experience of other doctors as well as recounting his own. He has talked to medical men who have participated in executions and to others who have become prosecuting lawyers in malpractice suits. Dr. Gawande encourages his colleagues to observe their performance in a quantitative way. A simple example of this is that medics; including himself, wash their hands about a third as often as they should. By contrast, doctors at the World Health Organization monitor polio with such diligence that a single case in southern India leads to the rapid mobilization of a massive vaccination program. Army surgeons in Afghanistan and Iraq are, he believes, masters at working out ways to improve their performance. For example, their exhaustive spreadsheets reveal that when surgeons are faced with wounded men off the battlefield, the death count is reduced if, instead of continuing the necessary emergency treatment, they ship the anaesthetized soldiers off to other, perhaps better-equipped facilities, their wounds often still open and packed with gauze. Both authors recall professionals they respect telling them that the best doctors are those who can put themselves in their patients’ shoes. This allows them to approach openly the question of when to give up on aggressive treatment and let the patient’s failing health progress peacefully. Deaths can often be made easier than they would have been if too much medical ambition had been involved. Where these books disappoint, if only slightly, is in the very occasional use of a specialized term when an everyday phrase would have done. A pity, but a small one. In general, both books succeed in being as engaging to the layman as to the practicing or studying doctor. They should be required reading for the latter.

What is the article’s criticism of the two books（）

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