Atul the Great

I love Atul Gawande's essays in The New Yorker. If you haven't read them, you should. They've been collected here, and now here. In addition to being an accomplished surgeon and a terrific writer, it turns out that Gawande is also a character from a Wes Anderson movie who has stepped off the screen into real life. I offer the following tidbits from this profile of him as definitive proof:

He sent it to the lab, along with a blood sample to see if the parathyroid hormone levels had started to come down, and while waiting for the results he took out a marking pen and drew a game of Hangman on the surgical drapes covering the unconscious patient. His word was "velvet," which stumped everyone.

***

Pulling out his Blackberry, he said, "It seems like there’s a story in every nook and cranny of medicine," and scrolling down a list of 106 ideas he’d saved, he picked a few. "Itching," he said. "Nobody really understands what it is."