245 quotes found
“The doctor looked shifty. Hes still breathing, he said. Look, his pulse is nearly humming and hes got a temperature you could fry eggs on. He hesitated, aware that this was probably too straightfor...”
“Surely you couldn't be a good doctor and a terrible human being---surely the laws of man, if not God, didn't allow it.”
“Be what you want to be,not what your parents want.”
“To do nothing for the gomers was to do something, and the more conscientiously I did nothing the better they got.”
“Primum non nocere, 'First, don't make things worse,' was an essential principle of Hippocrates' medicine. Nowadays, unfortunately, it seems to have been forgotten. Conventional modern medicine aims...”
“But at the most basic level, doctors need to be able to come forward with their errors and near-misses, otherwise we will never know where the problems lay.”
“For years I had convinced myself that, as a doctor, I sacrificed moments with friends, family, and my husband for the greater good. The call to heal the sick and tend the injured superseded all els...”
“As pervasive as medicine has become in modern life, it remains mostly hidden and often misunderstood. We have taken it to be both more perfect than it is and less extraordinary than it can be.”
“Lord, give me strength and ability to understand when I can heal,but give me the wisdom to understand when my profession is useless.”
“Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio describes emotions as the "continuous musical line of our minds, the unstoppable humming." This basso continuo thrums along while doctors make a steady stream of cons...”
“Words began to feel as weightless as the breath that carried. Stepping back, I realized that I was merely confirming what I already knew: I wanted that direct experience. It was only in practicing ...”
“It is more important to know what sort of person has a disease than to know what sort of disease a person has.”
“Cure sometimes, treat often and comfort always.”
“Public "facts" are not like pebbles on the beach, lying in the sun and waiting to be seen. They must instead be picked, polished, shaped and packaged. Finally ready for display they the bear the ma...”
“Reality" is defined not as something that exists "out there" for the scientist or anyone else to discover but as a social construction that emerges from and is sustained by social interaction.”
“In our society, unless something can be measured then it doesn't exist. This is especially true in the world of medicine.”
“...[D]eviance is an attributed designation rather than something inherent in individuals...”
“When a theological world view dominated, deviance was sin; when the nation-states emerged from the decay of feudalism, most deviance became designated as crime; and in our own scientifically orient...”
“[T]here are no illnesses in nature, only relationships. There are, of course, naturally occurring events, including infectious viruses, malignant growths, ruptures of tissues, and unusual chromosom...”
“Illnesses represent human judgments of conditions that exist in the natural world. They are essentially social constructions - products of our own creation.”
