Explores how doctors strive to close the gap between best intentions and best performance in the face of obstacles that sometimes seem insurmountable. This book discusses the ethical dilemmas of doctors' participation in lethal injections and examines the influence of money on modern medicine.

Giving an account of the life of a surgeon, this book looks at what it is like to cut into people's bodies and the - literally life and death - decisions that have to be made. It includes chronicles of operations that go wrong; of doctors who go to the bad; why autopsies are necessary; and what it feels like to insert your knife into someone.

Explores the significance of the lowly checklist, and how it has revolutionised medical practice and saved lives. This book looks at how taking this idea to the complicated world of surgery produced a 90-second checklist that reduced surgical deaths and complications in eight hospitals around the world by more than one-third.