medicine

Illnesses represent human judgments of conditions that exist in the natural world. They are essentially social constructions - products of our own creation.

What is troubling is not just being average but settling for it. Everyone knows that average-ness is, for most of us, our fate. And in certain matters__ooks, money, tennis__e would do well to accept this. But in your surgeon, your child's pediatrician, your police department, your local high school? When the stakes are our lives and the lives of our children, we want no one to settle for average.

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.

Gallows humor is part of having a doctor in the house. Deal with it.

When speaking of the mighty Andes and the so-called "eyebrows" country at the range's eastern base- the Tropical Wet Forest region-I am first obliged to give homage to the Apu, the Mountain Lords, the ice-capped everlasting sovereigns of these great lands, on whose forested slopes manifests the most marvelous biological diversity.

The doctor looked shifty. __e__ still breathing,_ he said. __ook, his pulse is nearly humming and he__ got a temperature you could fry eggs on._ He hesitated, aware that this was probably too straightforward and easily understood; medicine was a new art on the Disc, and wasn__ going to get anywhere if people could understand it. __yrocerebrum ouerf culinaire,_ he said, after working it out in his head. __ell, what can you do about it?_ said Arthur. __othing. He__ dead. All the medical tests prove it. So, er_bury him, keep him nice and cool, and tell him to come and see me next week. In daylight, for preference.""But he__ still breathing!_ __hese are just reflex actions that might easily confuse the layman,_ said the doctor airily. Chidder sighed. He suspected that the Guild, who after all had an unrivalled experience of sharp knives and complex organic compounds, was much better at elementary diagnostics than were the doctors. The Guild might kill people, but at least it didn__ expect them to be grateful for it.

Eunuchs do not take the gout, nor become bald.

I always feel that young doctors are only too anxious too experiment. After they've whipped out all our teeth, and administered quantities of very peculiar glands, and removed bits of our insides, they then confess that nothing can be done for us. I really prefer the old-fashioned remedy of big black bottles of medicine. After all, one can always pour those down the sink.

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.

Cure sometimes, treat often and comfort always.

The standard treatments for cancer are not meant to heal, but to destroy.

...[D]eviance is an attributed designation rather than something inherent in individuals...

With all due respect to my surgeon, in a perfect world he would be out of a job.

When our time is limited and we are uncertain about how best to serve our priorities, we are forced to deal with the fact that both the experiencing self and the remembering self matter. We do not want to endure long pain and short pleasure. Yet certain pleasures can make enduring suffering worthwhile. The peaks are important, and so is the ending.

On the day I swore to uphold the Hippocratic oath, the small hairs on the back of my neck stood up as I waited for lightning to strike. Who was I, vowing calmly among all these necktied young men to steal life out of nature's jaws, every old time we got half a chance and a paycheck?... I could not accept the contract: that every child born human upon this earth comes with a guarantee of perfect health and old age clutched in its small fist.

I should never have been happy in any profession that did not call forth the highest intellectual strain, and yet keep me in good warm contact with my neighbors. There is nothing like the medical profession for that: one can have the exclusive scientific life that touches the distance and befriend the old fogie in the parish too.

Good medicine always tastes bad.

Death with dignity" is our society's expression of the uni­versal yearning to achieve a graceful triumph over the stark and often repugnant finality of life's last sputterings. But the fact is, death is not a confrontation. It is simply an event in the sequence of nature's ongoing rhythms. Not death but disease is the real enemy, disease the malign force that requires confron­tation. Death is the surcease that comes when the exhausting bat­tle has been lost. Even the confrontation with disease should be approached with the realization that many of the sicknesses of our species are simply conveyances for the inexorable journey by which each of us is returned to the same state of physical, and perhaps spiritual, nonexistence from which we emerged at conception. Every triumph over some major pathology, no matter how ringing the victory, is only a reprieve from the inevitable end.