The Lexicographer's Rules

;In the 1992 book Intensive Care, by Dr. Robert Zussman, a professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts, an I.C.U. intern reports a dream. In it, he finds penguins in a basement. The birds need to be in a cold environment or they will die, so to save one, he takes it, puts it into a blender with some ice and turns the blender on. The penguin is suddenly floating in a slushy pool of blood. The intern wakes up. The dream’s interpretation is clear enough: in the I.C.U., sometimes the cure is worse than the disease. (Source Link)

This reminds me of a book I’ve been very much looking forward to, Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science by Atul Gawande. I’ve been reading it in bits and pieces in the New Yorker for a few years now and finally it’s appeared as a book. Gawande writes about uncomfortable truths of medicine, like the fact that young doctors have to practice new procedures on real patients (there’s only so much you can learn by practicing on an orange or a cadaver), or how there’s no good way to give bad news to patients and there loved ones. Gawande is chief surgery resident at a big Eastern hospital; how he finds time and energy to do that and write for the big leagues is beyond me.

I think I may have heard an interview with him. Truly fascinating, in a way that Oliver Sacks has failed to be, for Sacks describes the unusual to amaze us, while Gawande describes the unknown commonplace to involve us. There’s a short excerpt from the book. An interview in The Atlantic. Also, he and New York Times science writer Natalie Angier did Slate’s Breakfast Table letter exchange.

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