Surgeon Doctors Quotes

MAKE STATEMENTS also applies to us women: Speak in statements instead of apologetic questions. No one wants to go to a doctor who says, “I’m going to be your surgeon? I’m here to talk to you about your procedure? I was first in my class at Johns Hopkins, so?” Make statements, with your actions and your voice.

No matter what measures are taken, doctors will sometimes falter, and it isn't reasonable to ask that we achieve perfection. What is reasonable is to ask that we never cease to aim for it.

...You know, lots of female cyborgs are left infertile because of the invasive procedures, but from the looks of it, I don’t suspect you will have any problems.” Cinder sat on one of the exam tables, chin settled atop both palms. “Lucky me.” The doctor wagged a finger at her. “You should be grateful your surgeons took such care.” “I’m sure I’ll feel much more grateful when I find a guy who thinks complex wiring in a girl is a turn-on.

Are doctors who make mistakes villains? No, because then we all are.

Surgeons know nothing but do everything. Internists know everything but do nothing. Pathologists know everything and do everything but too late.

Nostalgia can be more painful than a surgeon's knife.

Betterment is perpetual labor. The world is chaotic, disorganized, and vexing, and medicine is nowhere spared that reality. To complicate matters, we in medicine are also only human ourselves. We are distractible, weak, and given to our own concerns. Yet still, to live as a doctor is to live so that one's life is bound up in others' and in science and in the messy, complicated connection between the two It is to live a life of responsibility. The question then, is not whether one accepts the responsibility. Just by doing this work, one has. The question is, having accepted the responsibility, how one does such work well.

My father, for whose skills as a surgeon I have the deepest respect, says, "The operation with the best outcome is the one you decide not to do." Knowing when not to operate, knowing when I am in over my head, knowing when to call for the assistance of a surgeon of my father's caliber--that kind of talent, that kind of "brilliance," goes unheralded.

In these days before antiseptics, doctors themselves also suffered high mortality rates. Florence Nightingale, a nurse during the Crimean War (1853-1856), watched one particularly inept surgeon cut both himself and, somehow, a bystander while blundering about during an amputation. Both men contracted an infection and died, as did the patient. Nightingale commented that it was the only surgery she'd ever seen with 300 percent mortality.

Do what is right, and do it now.

I'm taking inorganic chem and physics not because I want to but because I have to. Not every doctor wants to be a scientist. Some of us just want to take care of sick people. I can't help thinking that medicine is more closely aligned to the humanities than to the sciences. I can't help thinking that I could learn more about being a good doctor from William Shakespeare than I could from Isaac Newton. After all, isn't understanding people at least as important as understanding pathology?

The core predicament of medicine - the thing that makes being a patient so wrenching, being a doctor so difficult, and being a part of society that pays the bills they run up so vexing - is uncertainty. With all that we know nowadays about people and diseases and how to diagnose and treat them, it can be hard to see this, hard to grasp how deeply uncertainty runs. As a doctor, you come to find, however, that the struggle in caring for people is more often with what you do not know than what you do. Medicine's ground state is uncertainty. And wisdom - for both the patients and doctors - is defined by how one copes with it.

Sure, a surgeon can stand to look at a mutilated body," Crawford said, crumpling his cup and stepping on the pedal of the covered wastebasket. "But I don't think a doctor can stand to see a life wasted.

Going to give you some words of wisdom,” he said, “that were passed down to me when I became a surgeon. Consider them a surgeon’s survival guide.” I closed my eyes briefly, indicating I was ready to absorb. “When you can eat, eat. When you can sleep, sleep. When you can fuck, fuck. But do not fuck with the pancreas.

We are used to thinking of doctoring as a solitary, intellectual task. But making medicine go right is less often like making a difficult diagnosis than like making sure everyone washes their hands.

Science affects the average man and woman in two ways already. He or she benefits by its application driving a motor-car or omnibus instead of a horse-drawn vehicle, and being treated for disease by a doctor or surgeon rather than a witch.

The seemingly easiest and most sensible rule for a doctor to follow is: Always Fight. Always look for what more you could do.

When doctor saves a life, he also saves a family.

Leola Mae Harmon. I saw a movie about her on the Lifetime channel. Leola was an air force nurse who was in a car accident and the lower part of her face got all mangled, but then Armand Assante, who plays a plastic surgeon, said he could fix her. Leola had to endure hours of painful reconstructive surgery, during which her husband left her because she didn't have any lips (which I guess is why the movie is called Why Me?). Armand Assante said he would make her a new pair of lips, only the other air force doctors didn't like the fact that he wanted to make them out of skin from Leola's vagina. But he did it anyway, and then he and Leola got married and worked together to help give other accident victims vagina lips. And the whole thing turned out to have been based on a true story.

To become a doctor, you spend so much time in the tunnels of preparation--head down, trying not to screw up, just going from one day to the next--that it is a shock to find yourself at the other end, with someone shaking your hand and offering you a job. But the day comes.

so specialized, in fact, that I feared surgeons would no longer be able to do humanitarian work. They simply wouldn’t have the array of skills necessary to treat the full gamut of injuries a single war surgeon would see in the field.

An incompetent doctor practices, but a competent doctor performs.

Offering care means being a companion, not a superior. It doesn’t matter whether the person we are caring for is experiencing cancer, the flu, dementia, or grief. If you are a doctor or surgeon, your expertise and knowledge comes from a superior position. But when our role is to be providers of care, we should be there as equals.

We want progress in medicine to be clear and unequivocal, but of course it rarely is. Every new treatment has gaping unknowns - for both patients and society - and it can be hard to decide what do do about them.

As good surgical doctor works on a patient in the theater with varied kinds of surgical instruments, so a true leader also needs a clean bag of leadership characters that vary from task to task. One-way leaders are obvious failures!

The important question isn't how to keep bad physicians from harming patient; it's how to keep good physicians from harming patients. Medical malpractice suits are a remarkably ineffective remedy. (In reference to a Harvard Medical Practice Study)... fewer than 2 percent of the patients who had received substandard care ever filed suit. Conversely, only a small minority among patients who did sue had in fact been victims of negligent care. And a patient's likelihood of winning a suit depended primarily on how poor his or her outcome was, regardless of whether that outcome was caused by disease or unavoidable risks of care. The deeper problem with medical malpractice is that by demonizing errors they prevent doctors from acknowledging & discussing them publicly. The tort system makes adversaries of patient & physician, and pushes each other to offer a heavily slanted version of events.

The reader, knowing nothing about the ‘dark continent,’ filled in the blanks. Pictured Stone in a tent, kerosene lamp held up by a Hottentot providing the only light, elephants stampeding outside while the good doctor recited Cicero and excised part of himself as blithely as if he were cutting for stone on the body of another.

The seemingly easiest and most sensible rule for a doctor to follow is: Always Fight. Always look for what more you could do. (...) But our fight is not always to do more. It is to do right by our patients, even though what is right is not always clear.

Six witnesses affirmed that Jacoba had cured them, even after numerous doctors had given up, and one patient declared that she was wiser in the art of surgery and medicine than any master physician or surgeon in Paris. But these testimonials were used against her, for the charge was not that she was incompetent, but that—as a woman—she dared to cure at all.

Walpole has no intellect. A mere surgeon. A wonderful operator but, after all, what is operating? . . . . Manual labour.

Surgeons must be very careful When they take the knife! Underneath their fine incisions Stirs the Culprit—Life!

Medicine’s ground state is uncertainty. And wisdom—for both patients and doctors—is defined by how one copes with it. This

Medicines ensures lengthy life but not necessarily healthy life.

Here are the ten most common professions of the hero, derived from the titles of more than 15,000 Harlequin romance novels: Doctor Cowboy Boss Prince Rancher Knight Surgeon King Bodyguard Sheriff

It was that summer, too, that I began the cutting, and was almost as devoted to it as to my newfound loveliness. I adored tending to myself, wiping a shallow red pool of my blood away with a damp washcloth to magically reveal, just above my naval: queasy. Applying alcohol with dabs of a cotton ball, wispy shreds sticking to the bloody lines of: perky. I had a dirty streak my senior year, which I later rectified. A few quick cuts and cunt becomes can't, cock turns into back, clit transforms to a very unlikely cat, the l and i turned into a teetering capital A. The last words I ever carved into myself, sixteen years after I started: vanish. Sometimes I can hear the words squabbling at each other across my body. Up on my shoulder, panty calling down to cherry on the inside of my right ankle. On the underside of a big toe, sew uttering muffled threats to baby, just under my left breast. I can quiet them down by thinking of vanish, always hushed and regal, lording over the other words from the safety of the nape of my neck. Also: At the center of my back, which was too difficult to reach, is a circle of perfect skin the size of a fist. Over the years I've made my own private jokes. You can really read me. Do you want me to spell it out for you? I've certainly given myself a life sentence. Funny, right? I can't stand to look myself without being completely covered. Someday I may visit a surgeon, see what can be done to smooth me, but now I couldn't bear the reaction. Instead I drink so I don't think too much about what I've done to my body and so I don't do any more. Yet most of the time that I'm awake, I want to cut. Not small words either. Equivocate. Inarticulate. Duplicitous. At my hospital back in Illinois they would not approve of this craving. For those who need a name, there's a gift basket of medical terms. All I know is that the cutting made me feel safe. It was proof. Thoughts and words, captured where I could see them and track them. The truth, stinging, on my skin, in a freakish shorthand. Tell me you're going to the doctor, and I'll want to cut worrisome on my arm. Say you've fallen in love and I buzz the outlines of tragic over my breast. I hadn't necessarily wanted to be cured. But I was out of places to write, slicing myself between my toes - bad, cry - like a junkie looking for one last vein. Vanish did it for me. I'd saved the neck, such a nice prime spot, for one final good cutting. Then I turned myself in.

So let me get this straight – this is a long sentence. We are going to be gifted with a health care plan that we are forced to purchase, and fined if we don’t, which reportedly covers 10 million more people without adding a single new doctor, but provides for 16,000 new IRS agents, written by a committee whose chairman doesn’t understand it, passed by Congress, that didn’t read it, but exempted themselves from it, and signed by a president who smokes, with funding administered by a treasury chief who didn’t pay his taxes, for which we will be taxed for four years before any benefits take effect, by a government which has bankrupted Social Security and Medicare, all to be overseen by a surgeon general who is obese and financed by a country that is broke. So what the blank could possibly go wrong?

I was temperamentally better suited to a cognitive discipline, to an introspective field—internal medicine, or perhaps psychiatry. The sight of the operating theater made me sweat. The idea of holding a scalpel caused coils to form in my belly. (It still does.) Surgery was the most difficult thing I could imagine. And so I became a surgeon.

The old joke is that psychiatrists are doctors who can't stand the sight of blood. Maybe they can't stand it, but if they work where I work, they damn well better get used to it. At least surgeons and prizefighters get to wear gloves

And this is a Buddhist country?” said Matt, “This is a country of lovingkindness and compassion? Hah. I think the Americans would call this ‘tough love.’ ” “That is the paradox of Buddhism,” said Ranjit, “As a young doctor I would see these violent things and wonder why they happened, knowing that it was not something that Buddhists should do. Then I realized we are not born Buddhist. All the focus on channeling anger and dealing with hardship did not emanate from these people…. It was a lesson to these people. We are a land of Buddhists because we need to hear the lessons of Buddha, not because we follow Buddha.” -spoken by Ranjit, the surgeon, after an episode of violence....

It’s all along of the unicorn’s horn – it’s all along of the glorious hand. Huzzay, three times huzzay for the doctor!’ Lord, how they cheered their surgeon! It was he who had brought the narwhal’s tusk aboard: and the severed hand, the Hand of Glory, was his property: both symbolized (and practically guaranteed) immense good fortune, virility, safety from poison or any disease you chose to name: and both had proved their worth.

It is unsettling to find how little it takes to defeat success in medicine. You come as a professional equipped with expertise and technology. You do not imagine that a mere matter of etiquette could foil you. But the social dimension turns out to be as essential as the scientific--matters of how casual you should be, how formal, how reticent, how forthright. Also: how apologetic, how self-confident, how money-minded. In this work against sickness, we begin not with genetic or cellular interactions, but with human ones. They are what make medicine so complex and fascinating. How each interaction is negotiated can determine whether a doctor is trusted, whether a patient is heard, whether the right diagnosis is made, the right treatment given. But in this realm there are no perfect formulas.

In the year 1878 I took my degree of Doctor of Medicine of the University of London, and proceeded to Netley to go through the course prescribed for surgeons in the army.

By law I can call myself, like everyone else, a virologist, but the virologists are not allowed to call themselves a plastic surgeon, most of them not even a doctor!

Although the Centurion’s chief surgeon, the squadron’s most experienced doctor,

Little more than a decade ago, doctors made the decisions; patients did what they were told.

Most doctors, taking seriously the idea that patients should control their own fates, lay out the options and the risks involved.

Even good doctors can go bad, and when they do, colleagues tend to be almost entirely unequipped to do anything about them.

Doctors with high confidence in a judgment they made proved no more accurate than doctors with low confidence.

But once he put his recommendations down on paper it was hard for hospitals and medical groups not to follow through and hold doctors to the plan.

At most, a doctor might say, “I’m sorry that things didn’t go as well as we had hoped.

Doctors quickly learn that how much they make has little to do with how good they are. It largely depends on how they handle the business side of their practice. Many

If there wasn't unwinding, there'd be fewer surgeons, and more doctors. If there wasn't unwinding, they'd go back to trying to cure diseases instead of just replacing stuff with someone else's.

No matter who you were in sixteenth-century Europe, you could be sure of two things: you would be lucky to reach fifty years of age, and you could expect a life of discomfort and pain. Old age tires the body by thirty-five, Erasmus lamented, but half the population did not live beyond the age of twenty. There were doctors and there was medicine, but there does not seem to have been a great deal of healing. Anyone who could afford to seek a doctor's aid did so eagerly, but the doctor was as likely to maim or kill as to cure. His potions were usually noxious and sometimes fatal—but they could not have been as terrible and traumatic as the contemporary surgical methods. The surgeon and the Inquisitor differed only in their motivation: otherwise, their batteries of knives, saws, and tongs for slicing, piercing, burning, and amputating were barely distinguishable. Without any anesthetic other than strong liquor, an operation was as bad as the torments of hell.

I need the emergency room,' she repeated. 'I need a doctor. need someone to check my eye. I need a surgeon.' 'I know exactly what you need,' Mark said. 'Welcome to Waffle House,' the waitress said

They belong to the connected and the knowledgeable, to insiders over outsiders, to the doctor’s child but not the truck driver’s. If choice cannot go to everyone, maybe it is better when it is not allowed at all.

Doctor Benway is operating in an auditorium filled with students: "Now, boys, you won't see this operation performed very often and there's a reason for that ... You see it has absolutely no medical value. No one knows what the purpose of it originally was or if it had a purpose at all. Personally I think it was a pure artistic creation from the beginning. Just as a bull fighter with his skill and knowledge extricates himself from danger he has himself invoked, so in this operation the surgeon deliberately endangers his patient, and then, with incredible speed and celerity, rescues him from death at the last possible split second ... "Did any of you ever see Doctor Tetrazzini perform? I say perform advisedly because his operations were performances. He would start by throwing a scalpel across the room into the patient and then make his entrance like a ballet dancer. His speed was incredible: `I don't give them time to die,' he would say. Tumors put him in a frenzy of rage. `Fucking undisciplined cells!' he would snarl, advancing on the tumor like a knife-fighter.

My mother has always been sickly; and though she has only gone to the hospital when she has been compelled to, it has cost a great deal of money, and my father’s life has been practically given up to it. “If only I knew how much the operation costs,” says he. “Have you not asked?” “Not directly. I cannot do that—the surgeon might take it amiss and that would not do; he must operate on Mother.” Yes, I think bitterly, that’s how it is with us, and with all poor people. They don’t dare ask the price, but worry themselves dreadfully beforehand about it; but the others, for whom it is not important, they settle the price first as a matter of course. And the doctor does not take it amiss from them.

The surgical ICU had its surgeons and anesthesiologists, doctors who wrote the shortest and most indecipherable notes. The notes reminded me of haikus, and because I wasn’t a literary person, I called my time in this unit difficult poetry.

In 1967, psychiatrist Leonard Stein described the nurse’s role in an essay entitled “The Doctor–Nurse Game.” The object of the game, he said, was for a nurse to “make her recommendations appear to be initiated by the physician. . . . The nurse who does see herself as a consultant but refuses to follow the rules of the game in making her recommendations, has hell to pay. The outspoken nurse is labeled a ‘bitch’ by the surgeon. The psychiatrist describes her as unconsciously suffering from penis envy.

And as for those high school students who tell me they would rather be a cat than an MD because they prefer to deal with animals and not to deal with people, I let them know they have it all wrong. Veterinarians get to work with animals. We get to work for people.

I had heard rumors that some doctors stop surgery halfway through and demand more money from the patient, and if the patient doesn’t pay up, the surgeon just leaves them there, opened up on the operating table with their stomach and intestines exposed to the cold air.

One American in seven has no coverage, and one in three younger than sixty-five will lose coverage at some point in the next two years. These are people who aren't poor or old enough to qualify for government programs but whose jobs aren't good enough to provide benefits either.

...where they had control--their skills, for example--these doctors sought betterment. They understood themselves to be part of a larger world of medical knowledge and accomplishment. Moreover, they believed they could measure up in it...partly...a function of...camaraderie as a group.

...as I read it [magazine with gloomy predictions about what was going to happen to the planet], I wondered whether becoming a doctor, healing myself by healing others, might not be a little self-indulgent. There might be more important ways of trying to make the world a better place - admittedly less glamorous ones - than by being a surgeon. I have never entirely escaped the view that being a doctor is something of a moral luxury, by which doctors are easily corrupted. We can so easily end up complacent and self-important, feeling ourselves to be more important than our patients.

Percy thought Frank had said surgeons. He had this weird image of giant doctors in scrubs and face masks, pulling their boat upstream. Then he realized Frank meant sturgeons, like the fish. He was glad he hadn’t said anything. Would have been embarrassing, his being son of the sea god and all.

You have a cough that won’t go away—and then? It’s not science you call upon but a doctor. A doctor with good days and bad days. A doctor with a weird laugh and a bad haircut. A doctor with three other patients to see and, inevitably, gaps in what he knows and skills he’s still trying to learn.

Confederate surgeons usually performed “circular” amputations. They made a 360-degree cut through the skin, then scrunched it up like a shirt cuff. After sawing through the muscle and bone, they inched the skin back down to wrap the stump. This method led to less scarring and infection. Union surgeons preferred “flap” amputations: doctors left two flaps of flesh hanging beside the wound to fold over after they’d sawed through. This method was quicker and provided a more comfortable stump for prosthetics. Altogether, surgeons lopped off 60,000 fingers, toes, hands, feet, and limbs during the war.

Medical care is about our life and death, and we’ve always needed doctors to help us understand what is happening and why, and what is possible and what is not. In the increasingly tangled web of experts and expert systems, a doctor has an even greater obligation to serve as a knowledgeable guide and

How many concealed suicides were committed by deliberate drug discontinuance is not known. These deaths almost always were classed as being caused by "noncompliance." Doctors, like all other people, do not like to admit imperfections or failure. It was better to blame the patients for their own demise.

My first day in the hospital, the chief resident said to me, "Neurosurgery residents aren't just the best surgeons -- we're the best doctors in the hospital. That's your goal. Make us proud." The chairman, passing through the ward: "Always eat with your left hand. You've got to learn to be ambidextrous.

Dr. Lucy Davis. That’s Davis as in her parents own the team. She’s a pediatric surgeon and just got back from Syria where she was working with Doctors Without Borders.” Whatever. I organize a canned food drive for the homeless shelter in the Bowery every Thanksgiving. Do I go around bragging about it? No.

All they were using for their prediction was their analysis of the surgeon’s tone of voice. In fact, it was even more basic than that: if the surgeon’s voice was judged to sound dominant, the surgeon tended to be in the sued group. If the voice sounded less dominant and more concerned, the surgeon tended to be in the non-sued group. Could there be a thinner slice? Malpractice sounds like one of those infinitely complicated and multidimensional problems. But in the end it comes down to a matter of respect, and the simplest way that respect is communicated is through tone of voice, and the most corrosive tone of voice that a doctor can assume is a dominant tone.

The good doctor reassured John these were people who put their psychopathy to good use. They lived productive, well-adjusted lives as surgeons, CEOs and ambulance drivers. The light bulb went on. The CSC [Correctional Service of Canada] doesn't have to go through all these gyrations to reprogram anyone, they just have to find every inmate the right job!

I fear the democratization of plastic surgery, when it's so cheap that everyone - the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker - goes under the knife and winds up looking like these tightly pulled, slightly surprised-looking society and celebrity aliens from Planet Botox. . . . When I was young, I could have bottled up my self-loathing and filled a mile of train cars with it. Now that I'm old, I can't think of anyone I'd rather be than me. . . . That's what we need now: surgeons who can slice away the self-consciousness, the fear, the loneliness, and inject a little hope instead. A little love. Or a doctor who implants only high spirits, penchants for practical jokes, or the ability to cha-cha even to a dirge beat.

When a patient comes in with a fatal head bleed, that first conversation with a neurosurgeon may forever color how the family remembers the death, from a peaceful letting go (“Maybe it was his time”) to an open sore of regret (“Those doctors didn’t listen! They didn’t even try to save him!”). When there’s no place for the scalpel, words are the surgeon’s only tool.

The greatest choking authority of all time was almost certainly a dour American doctor with the luxuriant name of Chevalier Quixote Jackson, who lived from 1865 to 1958. Jackson has been called (by the Society of Thoracic Surgeons) “the father of American bronchoesophagoscopy,” and he was most assuredly that, though it must also be said there were not a lot of other contenders.

In chapter 9, I shared with you the power of food in the form of an all-fat ketogenic diet to break seizures in children. For them, food is medicine. Depression and anxiety are increasingly being understood in terms of aberrant electrical brain waves, and doctors in the emerging field of “nutritional psychiatry” are prescribing diets that can lessen anxiety and improve your mood.

The doctors are busy with the repulsive but beneficent work of amputation. You see the sharp, curved knife enter the healthy, white body, you see the wounded man suddenly regain consciousness with a piercing cry and curses, you see the army surgeon fling the amputated arm into a corner, you see another wounded man, lying in a litter in the same apartment, shrink convulsively and groan as he gazes at the operation upon his comrade, not so much from physical pain as from the moral torture of anticipation. — You behold the frightful, soul-stirring scenes; you behold war, not from its conventional, beautiful, and brilliant side, with music and drum-beat, with fluttering flags and galloping generals, but you behold war in its real phase — in blood, in suffering, in death.

Amid the tragedies and failures, I feared I was losing sight of the singular importance of human relationships, not between patients and their families but between doctor and patient. Technical excellence was not enough. As a resident, my highest ideal was not saving lives—everyone dies eventually—but guiding a patient or family to an understanding of death or illness. When a patient comes in with a fatal head bleed, that first conversation with a neurosurgeon may forever color how the family remembers the death, from a peaceful letting go (“Maybe it was his time”) to an open sore of regret (“Those doctors didn’t listen! They didn’t even try to save him!”). When there’s no place for the scalpel, words are the surgeon’s only tool. For amid that unique suffering invoked by

After surgery, he told his doctors that the pain was exactly as it was, but he did not feel it as greatly. “It’s as if,” he had said, a cool blandness in his eyes, “the pain is not being done to me.” One day, maybe in a ten years, or fifty years, a surgeon will be able to do this with disturbing precision, destroy a whirlpool of memory, an entire system of feelings, but in the meantime it’s like taking a hatchet to a spider’s web.

We always hope for the easy fix: the one simple change that will erase a problem in a stroke. But few things in life work this way. Instead, success requires making a hundred small steps go right - one after the other, no slipups, no goofs, everyone pitching in. We are used to thinking of doctoring as a solitary, intellectual task. But making the medicine go right is less often like making a difficult diagnosis than like making sure everyone washes their hands.

Dr. Richard Selzer is a surgeon and a favorite author of mine. He writes the most beautiful and compassionate descriptions of his patients and the human dramas they confront. In his book Letters to a Young Doctor, he said that most young people seem to be protected for a time by an imaginary membrane that shields them from horror. They walk in it every day but are hardly aware of its presence. As the immune system protects the human body from the unseen threat of harmful bacteria, so this mythical membrane guards them from life-threatening situations. Not every young person has this protection, of course, because children do die of cancer, congenital heart problems, and other disorders. But most of them are shielded—and don’t realize it. Then, as years roll by, one day it happens. Without warning, the membrane tears, and horror seeps into a person’s life or into the life of a loved one. It is at this moment that an unexpected theological crisis presents itself.

As a resident, my highest ideal was not saving lives—everyone dies eventually—but guiding a patient or family to an understanding of death or illness. When a patient comes in with a fatal head bleed, that first conversation with a neurosurgeon may forever color how the family remembers the death, from a peaceful letting go ("Maybe it was his time") to an open sore of regret ("Those doctors didn't listen! They didn't even try to save him!"). When there's no place for the scalpel, words are the surgeon's only tool.

We take the stairs down to the first level of the parking garage and I lead us toward the area reserved for doctors. She makes her way toward a black Audi, turns, and waits for me to join her. I smirk. “That’s not my car.” She nods. “Right, of course. I see it now.” She goes to a bright yellow Ferrari that belongs to one of the plastic surgeons. The vanity license plate reads: SXY DOC88. “Here we are.” “Not even close.” “Oh, okay. I get it. You aren’t flashy. Maybe that gray Range Rover over there?” I press the unlock button on my key fob and my rear lights flash. There she is, the car I’ve driven since I was in medical school. “You’re kidding. A Prius?! Satan himself drives a Prius?!” She turns around as if hoping to find someone else she can share this moment with. All she’s got is me. I shrug. “It gets good gas mileage.” She blinks exaggeratedly. “I couldn’t be more shocked if you’d hitched a horse to a buggy.” I chuckle and open the back door to toss in her backpack. “Get in. Traffic is going to be hell.” We buckle up in silence, back up and leave the parking garage in silence, pull out into traffic in silence. Finally, I ask, “Where do you live?” “On the west side. Right across from Franklin Park.” “Good. I have an errand I need to run that’s right by there. Mind if I do that before I drop you off?” “Well seeing as how you stole my backpack and forced me into your car, I don’t really think it matters what I want.” I see. She’s still pouting. That’s fine. “Good. Glad we’re on the same page.” She doesn’t think I’m funny.

Of one slave Carter wrote, “dismembering will reclaim him.… I have cured many a Negro of running away by this means.” This horrible practice, legalized in 1705, evidently became widespread, with much resultant butchery; it received further legal blessing in the tightening of the slave laws in 1723, when the Virginia Assembly absolved owners and surgeons of manslaughter if such “dismembering” resulted in the slave’s death. The lawmakers assumed that no sane man would deliberately destroy his own very valuable property. It is hideous to imagine that doctors would participate in such medical atrocities, but they did.

Now sensitiveness to the state of mind of the public is a difficult thing to achieve or maintain. Any man can tell you with more or less accuracy and clearness his own reactions on any particular issue. But few men have the time or the interest or the training to develop a sense of what other persons think or feel about the same issue. In his own profession the skilled practitioner is sensitive and understanding. lhe lawyer can tell what argument will appeal to court or jury. “The salesman can tell what points to stress to his prospective buyers. The politician can tell what to emphasize to his audience, but the ability to estimate group reactions on a large scale over a wide geographic and psychological area is a specialized ability which must be developed with the same painstaking self-criticism and with the same dependence on experience that are required for the development of the clinical sense in the doctor or the surgeon. The significant revolution of modern times is not industrial or economic or political, but the revolution which is taking place in the art of creating consent among the governed. Within the life of the new generation now in control of affairs, persuasion has become a self-conscious art and a regular organ of popular government. None of us begins to understand the consequences, but it is no daring prophecy to say that the knowledge of how to create consent will alter every political premise. Under the impact of propaganda, not necessarily in the sinister meaning of the world alone, the only constants of our thinking have become variables. It is no longer possible, for example, to believe in the cardinal dogma of democracy that the knowledge needed for the management of human affairs comes up spontaneously from the human heart. Where we act on that theory we expose ourselves to self-deception and to farms of persuasion that we cannot verify. It has been demonstrated that we cannot rely upon intuition, conscience or the accidents of casual opinion if we are to deal with the world beyond our reach.

Then there will be blood." "You fear that. Even though the blood will most likely fall from our veins." "I don't want any blood to fall," I said. "It's like surgery," Robin said. "When a patient will die without the surgeon's knife, then you need to cut into the body. Blood falls, but the patient is saved." "And Aeland needs a surgeon," I sat up. My head pounded, but it was a muffled thump, at least. "To cut out the thing that's killing it. That's what you're saying." "Do you disagree?" I didn't dare shake my head. "I don't. But—" "Every patient fears the risks. And only the worst doctors pretend there aren't any. People die in surgery. It's dangerous," Robin said. "But if you just leave it, the patient will die without that intervention.

There are countless differences between the lives of people with money and people without. One is this: without the means to pay experts, it’s necessary to evolve a complex system of useful amateurs. When Charlie’s dad got what the doctor told him was a skin cancer, he drank a fifth of Maker’s Mark and asked a butcher friend to cut a divot out of his shoulder, because there was no way he could afford a surgeon. When Charlie’s friend’s cousin got married, they asked Mrs. Silva from three blocks over to make their wedding cake, because she loved to bake and had fancy pastry pipping doodads. And if the buttercream was a little grainy or one of the layers was a bit overbaked, well it was still sweet and just as tall as a cake in a magazine, and it only cost the price of supplies.

We also had some fun with another hard-drinking and know-it-all reporter from one of the ‘red top’ tabloids. I solemnly informed him that his luck was in, because one of our trainee surgeons was a real wizard at organ transplantion. We told him that, if he was shot through the belly, we would try to exchange his worn-out liver for a new one – and then he could start his prodigious drinking career all over again. While that was sinking in, we even asked if he had any objection to receiving an Argentine donor organ if one became available. It was all a bit of military black humour of course, but the poor chap went white-faced, and tried to make me swear on the Bible that I’d never arrange such a procedure, and would finish him off with a lethal injection instead. Transplant surgery in a Forward Dressing Station? Come alongside, Jack…

Code Blue! We’re losing him!” The EMTs hustled the gurney containing Erik Dawson’s broken body into the operating room where the surgical team waited. The nursing staff literally ripped his clothes off as they worked to stabilize him. “What do we have here?” the lead surgeon asked. His assistant didn’t bother to look up as she answered, “Auto accident. An eighteen- wheeler smashed his car into a guardrail.” The lead surgeon whistled through his teeth. “It’s a miracle he’s still breathing. Let’s keep him that way.” As the surgical team moved into action with skill born of practice, Erik drifted on the fringes of consciousness. Erik’s thoughts raced. What? Where? Anesthesia put him under, but as the doctors began their work and his parents prayed fervently in the waiting room, Erik spasmed and stopped breathing. Family Matters, from Home Again

Can I interest you in a tour of the shops?” “Shops? I only see one.” “Well, yes. There is only one. But it’s all we have need of, you see. Bright’s All Things shops has everything a young lady could wish to buy.” Mrs. Highwood surveyed the street. “Where is the doctor? Diana must have a doctor nearby at all times, to bleed her when she has her attacks.” Susanna winced. No wonder Diana’s health never fully returned. Such a useless, horrific practice, bleeding. A “remedy” more likely to drain life than preserve it, and one Susanna had barely survived herself. Out of habit, she adjusted her long, elbow-length gloves. Their seams chafed against the well-healed scars beneath. “There is a surgeon next town over,” she said. A surgeon she wouldn’t allow near cattle, much less a young lady. “Here in the village, we have a very capable apothecary.” She hoped the woman would not ask for specifics there.

Yes. This gradual walk toward not taking human suffering seriously anymore is something we experience in context-dependent ways already, and when you think of the global implications it’s scary to consider how malleable our experience might be. I’m thinking of a few local cases, like how surgeons and ER doctors need to inure themselves to the constant evidence of other people’s suffering, because otherwise they can’t get the job done. And every parent knows what it’s like to understand that the suffering of one’s three-year-old who bursts into tears over a lost toy is not something that needs to concern you as much as an adult bursting into tears over something else, and yet that suffering is no less vivid for the child. You can imagine that kind of immunity to the evident pain of other, seemingly conscious systems, growing over time. Life could seem more and more like a video game where everyone else becomes a prop.

I think the biggest thing is just how hard it is to be taken seriously, to be looked in the eye by doctors. I remember my doctors always looking at and talking to my partner, never to me, and if I was alone, just looking away. That’s an experience that Miranda frequently has in the book. Also, doctors quickly grabbing at “anxiety” as the reason why you might be in this shape. I felt pressure to make sure I wasn’t displaying any signs of stress so they had no reason to dismiss me or shut me up with a drug. I found there was a lot of pressure to be a good patient and to conform to some sort of progress narrative that my therapist or surgeon might have. And when your body fails to get better, they sort of want to blame you. So in All’s Well, Miranda is very anxious to prove that she is a good patient to her physical therapists and her doctors. But because she’s not improving, they dread her and don’t really know what to do with her anymore and they just kind of randomly experiment with her during therapy appointments—let’s do some tests, they say. It breeds a toxic relationship and a power dynamic that makes her really helpless, desperate, and ultimately worse off. There are some very sadistic surgeons and physical therapists in this book.

For nearly eight centuries, under her Mohammedan rulers, Spain set to all Europe a shining example of a civilized and enlightened State. Her fertile provinces, rendered doubly prolific by the industry and engineering skill of her conquerors, bore fruit an hundredfold. Cities innumerable sprang up in the rich valleys of the Guadelquivir and the Guadiana, whose names, and names only, still commemorate the vanished glories of their past. Art, literature, and science prospered, as they then prospered nowhere else in Europe. Students flocked from France and Germany and England to drink from the fountain of learning which flowed only in the cities of the Moors. The surgeons and doctors of Andalusia were in the van of science: women were encouraged to devote themselves to serious study, and the lady doctor was not unknown among the people of Cordova. Mathematics, astronomy and botany, history, philosophy and jurisprudence were to be mastered in Spain, and Spain alone. The practical work of the field, the scientific methods of irrigation, the arts of fortification and shipbuilding, the highest and most elaborate products of the loom, the graver and the hammer, the potter's wheel and the mason's trowel, were brought to perfection by the Spanish Moors. In the practice of war no less than in the arts of peace they long stood supreme.

...Cleveland was the first war over the protection of children to be fought not in the courts, but in the media... Given that most of the hearings took place out of sight of the press, the following examples are taken from the recollection of child protection workers present in court. In one case, during a controversy that centred fundamentally around disputes over the meaning of RAD [reflex anal dilatation], a judge refused to allow ‘any evidence about children’s bottoms’ in his courtroom. A second judge — hearing an application to have their children returned by parents about whom social services had grave worries told the assembled lawyers that, as she lived in the area, she could not help but be influenced by what she read in the press. Hardly surprising then that child protection workers soon found courts not hearing their applications, cutting them short, or loosely supervising informal deals which allowed children to be sent back to parents, even in cases where there was explicit evidence of apparent abuse to be explained and dealt with. (p21) [reflex anal dilatation (RAD): a simple clue which is suggestive of anal penetration from outside. It had been recognised as a valuable weapon in the armoury of doctors examining children for many decades and was endorsed by both the British Medical Association and the Association of Police Surgeons. (p18)]

If they’re not practicing deliberately, even experts can see their skills backslide. Ericsson shared with me an incredible example of this. Even though you might be inclined to trust the advice of a silver-haired doctor over one fresh out of medical school, it’s been found that in a few fields of medicine, doctors’ skills don’t improve the longer they’ve been practicing. The diagnostic accuracy of professional mammographers, for example, doesn’t get more accurate over the years. Why would that be? For most mammographers, practicing medicine is not deliberate practice, according to Ericsson. It’s more like putting into a tin cup than working with a coach. That’s because mammographers usually only find out if they missed a tumor months or years later, if at all, at which point they’ve probably forgotten the details of the case and can no longer learn from their successes and mistakes. One field of medicine in which this is definitively not the case is surgery. Unlike mammographers, surgeons tend to get better with time. What makes surgeons different from mammographers, according to Ericsson, is that the outcome of most surgeries is usually immediately apparent—the patient either gets better or doesn’t—which means that surgeons are constantly receiving feedback on their performance. They’re always learning what works and what doesn’t, always getting better. This finding leads to a practical application of expertise theory: Ericsson suggests that mammographers regularly be asked to evaluate old cases for which the outcome is already known. That way they can get immediate feedback on their performance.

As it happened, the child’s mother was a radiologist. The tumor looked malignant—the mother had already studied the scans, and now she sat in a plastic chair, under fluorescent light, devastated. “Now, Claire,” the surgeon began, softly. “Is it as bad as it looks?” the mother interrupted. “Do you think it’s cancer?” “I don’t know. What I do know—and I know you know these things, too—is that your life is about to—it already has changed. This is going to be a long haul, you understand? You have got to be there for each other, but you also have to get your rest when you need it. This kind of illness can either bring you together, or it can tear you apart. Now more than ever, you have to be there for each other. I don’t want either of you staying up all night at the bedside or never leaving the hospital. Okay?” He went on to describe the planned operation, the likely outcomes and possibilities, what decisions needed to be made now, what decisions they should start thinking about but didn’t need to decide on immediately, and what sorts of decisions they should not worry about at all yet. By the end of the conversation, the family was not at ease, but they seemed able to face the future. I had watched the parents’ faces—at first wan, dull, almost otherworldly—sharpen and focus. And as I sat there, I realized that the questions intersecting life, death, and meaning, questions that all people face at some point, usually arise in a medical context. In the actual situations where one encounters these questions, it becomes a necessarily philosophical and biological exercise. Humans are organisms, subject to physical laws, including, alas, the one that says entropy always increases. Diseases are molecules misbehaving; the basic requirement of life is metabolism, and death its cessation. While all doctors treat diseases, neurosurgeons work in the crucible of identity: every operation on the brain is, by necessity, a manipulation of the substance of our selves, and every conversation with a patient undergoing brain surgery cannot help but confront this fact. In addition, to the patient and family, the brain surgery is

Because I have already had a long leave I get none on Sundays. So the last Sunday before I go back to the front my father and eldest sister come over to see me. All day we sit in the Soldiers’ Home. Where else could we go? We don’t want to stay in the camp. About midday we go for a stroll on the moors. The hours are a torture; we do not know what to talk about, so we speak of my mother’s illness. It is now definitely cancer, she is already in the hospital and will be operated on shortly. The doctors hope she will recover, but we have never heard of cancer being cured. ”Where is she then?” I ask. ”In the Luisa Hospital,” says my father. ”In which class?” ”Third. We must wait till we know what the operation costs. She wanted to be in the third herself. She said that then she would have some company. And besides it is cheaper.” ”So she is lying there with all those people. If only she could sleep properly.” My father nods. His face is broken and full of furrows. My mother has always been sickly; and though she has only gone to the hospital when she has been compelled to, it has cost a great deal of money, and my father’s life has been practically given up to it. ”If only I knew how much the operation costs,” says he. ”Have you not asked?” ”Not directly, I cannot do that–the surgeon might take it amiss and that would not do; he must operate on mother.” Yes, I think bitterly, that’s how it is with us, and with all poor people. They don’t dare ask the price, but worry themselves dreadfully beforehand about it; but the others, for whom it is not important, they settle the price first as a matter of course. And the doctor does not take it amiss from them. ”The dressings afterwards are so expensive,” says my father. ”Doesn’t the Invalid’s Fund pay anything toward it, then?” I ask. ”Mother has been ill too long.” ”Have you any money at all?” He shakes his head: ”No, but I can do some overtime.” I know. He will stand at his desk folding and pasting and cutting until twelve o’clock at night. At eight o’clock in the evening he will eat some miserable rubbish they get in exchange for their food tickets, then he will take a powder for his headache and work on.

Priests, because they hear confessions and forgive sins and give counsel, are often called doctors of souls. You might call us the specialist surgeons of souls. We find the hidden problems, that people won’t speak about and couldn’t even if they would. We delve into the worst that human beings do—into the things that even they can’t explain—in order to find the person buried underneath the sin. Then we do our best to bring them back up with us. We see some of the harshest ugliness there is. Do you know why a person would cheat on their loving spouse with the full knowledge that it will wreck their children’s lives when the family falls apart? Do you know why a man would turn his own children against their mother so that they refuse to talk to her? Do you know why a woman would torture her children without leaving a mark, and scare them into not telling anyone? Do you know why people fake crimes and get their spouse arrested and sent to prison?” He stared at her expecting an answer, with an intensity that was almost frightening. She tried to voice an answer or two, but in the face of that earnest inquiry, they died unspoken. Easy answers and joking evasions wouldn’t do. She shook her head in the negative. “I do,” he said. “I’ve seen every one of those at least twice. And do you know what it’s taught me?” “What?” she asked, faintly. Sonia felt like she was talking with a monster. She was almost afraid of what lessons it had learned from the worst that human beings had to offer. “That the love of God is greater than all human evil. That where sin abounds, grace abounds more. I’ve seen some of the worst there is, and it doesn’t prove that life is meaningless. It proves that life is worth living. And it proves that we need God. I’m probably the most cynical person you’ve ever met, or ever will meet. But that doesn’t mean that I think life is bad. It means I know how much evil can exist in a good world. That’s what the faith gives me: I can stare evil in the face without blinking, because I know that it’s not the whole story.” He took a deep breath, then continued, a little more relaxed. “I’m sure that’s scary, if you’re used to blinking. I don’t know what to tell you, except that closing your eyes is not the way to be happy. If there’s something that you’re not supposed to look at, then look at it. If there’s something you’re not supposed to think about, then think about it. If something is too horrible to face, face it. Because the truth will set you free.” “You scare me,” she said, but it was an observation, neither a criticism nor a request to stop. He shrugged his shoulders. “Comfort is overrated,” he said. They stood there in silence for a few moments.

In Hiding - coming summer of 2020 WAYNE ANTHONY SEEKS REDEMPTION FROM A BAD DAY - Although warned about getting the stitches wet, he believed a hot shower was the only road to his redemption. Experienced taught him the best way to relieve the tightness in his lower back was by standing beneath the near-scalding water. Dropping the rest of his clothing, he turned the shower on full blast. The hot water rushed from the showerhead filling the tiny room with steam, instantly the small mirror on the medicine cabinet fogged up. The man quietly pulled the shower curtain back and entered the shower stall without a sound. Years of acting as another’s shadow had trained him to live soundlessly. The hot water cascaded over his body as the echo from the pounding water deadened slightly. Grabbing the sample sized soap, he pulled the paper off and tossed the wrapper over the curtain rail. Wayne rubbed the clean smelling block until his large hands disappeared beneath the lather. He ignored the folded washcloth, opting to use his hands across his body. Gently he cleaned the injury allowing the slime of bacterial soap to remove the residual of the rust-colored betadine. All that remained when he finished was the pale orange smear from the antiseptic. This scar was not the only mar to his body. The water cascaded down hard muscles making rivulets throughout the thatches of dark hair. He raised his arms gingerly as he washed beneath them; the tight muscles of his abdomen glistened beneath the torrent of water. Opening a bottle of shampoo-slash-conditioner, he applied a dab then ran his hands across his scalp. Finally, the tension in his square jaw had eased, making his handsome face more inviting. The cords of his neck stood out as he rinsed the shampoo from his hair. It coursed down his chest leading down to his groin where the scented wash caught in his pelvic hair. Wayne's body was one of perfection for any woman; if that was, she could ignore the mutilations. Knife injuries left their mark with jagged white lines. Most of these, he had doctored himself; his lack of skill resulted in crude scars. The deepest one, undulated along the left side of his abdomen, that one had required the art of a surgeon. Dropping his arms, he surrenders himself to the pelting deluge from the shower. The steamy water cascaded down his body, pulling the soap toward the drain. Across his back, it slid down several small indiscernible pockmarks left by gunshot wounds, the true extent of their damage far beneath his skin. Slowly the suds left his body, snaking down his muscular legs. It slithered down the scars on his left knee, the result of replacement surgery after a thug took a bat to it. Wayne stood until the hot water cooled, and ran translucent over his body. Finally, he washes the impact of the long day from his mind and spirit.