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Volume 353:645-648 August 18, 2005 Number 7 Next

	Since this article has no abstract, we have provided an extract of the first 100 words of the full text and any section headings.

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There is an exquisite and fascinating scene in Kandahar, a movie set in Afghanistan under the Taliban regime, in which a male physician is asked to examine a female patient. They are separated by an opaque screen. Behind it, the woman is covered from head to toe by her burka. The two do not talk directly to each other. The patient's young son serves as the go-between. She has a stomachache, he says.

"Does she throw up her food?" the doctor asks.

"Do you throw up your food?" the boy asks.

"No," the woman says, perfectly audibly, but the doctor . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Source Information

Dr. Gawande is a general and endocrine surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital and an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and at the Harvard School of Public Health, Boston.

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