From Harvard Magazine:
If Gawande is an unlikely surgeon, envisioning a career in medicine, more generally, was easy. He grew up in Athens, Ohio, the son of a urologist father and a pediatrician mother, and he has often said that following them into the field seemed so inevitable that he tried every way he could think of to avoid it. Careers he considered along the way included philosophy and politics; they did not include writing. His first published writing for a popular audience, in 1996, came at the invitation of Jacob Weisberg, a friend from Gawande’s time at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. Despite Gawande’s lack of writing experience, Weisberg, who helped found the online magazine Slate and later edited it, had a hunch that his friend would be good at explaining medicine to a lay audience. Besides, he was encouraged by what he knew of Gawande’s personal qualities: “Atul goes at everything in an incredibly focused, driven way. The odds of him not making something work are a lot lower than they would be with anybody else.”
More here.
