Before the First Cut

In 2008, surgeon Atul Gawande confronted a humbling reality: operating rooms staffed by the most highly trained professionals on earth were still making preventable mistakes. Working with the World Health Organization, Gawande developed a nineteen-item surgical safety checklist and tested it across eight hospitals from Toronto to Tanzania, Seattle to New Delhi. The steps were almost embarrassingly basic: confirm the patient's name, mark the correct site, count the instruments.…