Sublime

even at one of the world’s great academic medical centers you can easily declare yourself an expert in a condition that no one else wants to deal with.

I find my patients much more interesting than their diseases.

In recent years, Shaw’s turn-of-the-twentieth-century drama about the ethics and economics of healthcare has been seen as prescient, prefiguring the establishment of the National Health Service in Britain and the Affordable Care Act in the United States. Even with these developments, modern Colenso Ridgeons still grapple with limited resources, ine

I simply accepted that my role as a novice medical student—perhaps the only role I felt competent to fulfill—was to spend time at the bedside of a patient my superiors would just as soon avoid.

Hope is a central human emotion, misunderstood and often mistaken for optimism, as Jerome Groopman reminds us in The Anatomy of Hope.

on the subject, notes that some of the medical students who interviewed her when she worked as a standardized patient “seem to understand that empathy is always perched precariously between gift and invasion.”

You’re taking too long. How much blood can a patient lose before death is imminent? When she didn’t reply, he all but shouted. How much blood? “Five pints.” Correct. And your blundering has cost her at least three. Dr. Seldon,

“How focused we become in our little areas, and how easy it is to lose sight of the daily fears and concerns of our patients,”