Hello I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.

For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk.

Radio 4. My My castaway this week is the surgeon and author Atal Gowandy. A Harvard professor and

practicing physician, the titles of his best-selling books go a long way to explaining

the focus of his work in life. Being mortal, illness, medicine and what matters in the end.

Complications are surgeon's notes on an imperfect science.

His writing and teaching deftly explore the complex nexus between survival and sensitivity,

what it truly means to treat people effectively and indeed how it might be possible to better manage decline and even have a good death.

Born in Brooklyn then raised in Ohio, he began learning at his mother and indeed his father's knee.

Both were doctors who'd travelled from India to study and then work in the States.

His childhood seems almost a blueprint for the brainbox offspring of first-generation immigrants

when he wasn't reading encyclopedias, cover to cover, he was hanging round hospitals

waiting for his parents to finish their long shifts. He says, we look for his parents to finish their long shifts.

He says, we look for medicine to be an orderly field of knowledge and procedure,

but it is not. It is an imperfect science, an enterprise of constantly changing knowledge, uncertain information,

fallible individuals and at the same time lives on the line.

So welcome, Atal Guanday. Listeners will be very familiar, radio four listeners with your

wreath lectures which you gave last year. You hold two professorial posts at Harvard Medical School and at the School of Public Health.

You've written four best-selling books. You carry out over 120 surgeries each and every year.

If you were your doctor, what would you say to you about stress and

getting more sleep?

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