Lucian Leape’s legacy for patient safety
Atul A Gawande · 2026
Read Lucian Leape’s legacy for patient safety by Atul A Gawande (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/pmc-13217128.txt.
Description
Atul Gawande wrote a 2026 essay on the legacy of Lucian Leape, the physician who recast medical error as a systems problem. Leape argued that mistakes reveal system flaws, not character flaws. He died of heart failure at ninety-four. Gawande traces his path from steel-town roots to Harvard surgery.
Leape made medical mistakes his life laboratory. His work shifted medicine from prizing perfection to prizing humility. Error reporting and safety design grew from that shift. The essay recalls his late blooming and audacity. It frames his moral legacy for a new clinician generation.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Atul A Gawande |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 15 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |