Paul Brand > Quotes

“I have sometimes wondered why Jesus so frequently touched the people he healed, many of whom must have been unattractive, obviously diseased, unsanitary, smelly. With his power, he easily could have waved a magic wand. In fact, a wand would have reached more people than a touch. He could have divided the crowd into affinity groups and organized his miracles--paralyzed people over there, feverish people here, people with leprosy there--raising his hands to heal each group efficiently, en masse. But he chose not to. Jesus' mission was not chiefly a crusade against disease (if so, why did he leave so many unhealed in the world and tell followers to hush up details of healings?), but rather a ministry to individual people, some of whom happened to have a disease. He wanted those people, one by one, to feel his love and warmth and his full identification with them. Jesus knew he could not readily demonstrate love to a crowd, for love usually involves touching.”
― Paul Brand, Fearfully and Wonderfully Made

“A healthy body attends to the pain of the weakest part.”
― Paul Brand

“Previously I had thought of pain as a blemish of creation, God's one great mistake. Tommy Lewis taught me otherwise. Seen from his point of view, pain stands out as an extraordinary feat of engineering valuable beyond measure.”
― Dr. Paul Brand and Philip Yancey

“Pain takes place in the mind, and what calms the mind will enhance my ability to cope with pain.”
― Paul Brand, The Gift of Pain: Why We Hurt and What We Can Do About It

“Few experiences in life are more universal than pain, which flows like lava beneath the crust of daily life. I”
― Paul Brand, The Gift of Pain: Why We Hurt and What We Can Do About It

“Those two images, brought together by our conversation, underscored an important fact about pain: pain takes place in the mind, nowhere else.”
― Paul Brand, The Gift of Pain: Why We Hurt and What We Can Do About It

“Pain is always a mental or psychological event, a magician’s trick the mind knowingly plays on itself.”
― Paul Brand, The Gift of Pain: Why We Hurt and What We Can Do About It

“The health of the body depends largely on its attentiveness to the pain network.”
― Paul Brand, The Gift of Pain: Why We Hurt and What We Can Do About It

“A physical therapist in my office volunteered to run eight miles around the cement floor corridors of the Carville hospital in his stocking feet, pausing every two miles to let me take thermographic readings and test his stride in a slipper-sock. The first slipper-sock impression showed his normal walking pattern, a long stride with a high lift and a push”
― Paul Brand, The Gift of Pain: Why We Hurt and What We Can Do About It

“Human society confers little status on janitors because their position is considered unskilled. The Body [of Christ], however, recognizes that lowly janitor cells are indispensable to overall health. If you doubt that, ask someone who must go in for kidney dialysis three times per week.”
― Paul Brand, Fearfully and Wonderfully: The Marvel of Bearing God's Image

“From all this rapid-fire activity—five trillion chemical processes a second—we form patterns of meaning about the world.”
― Paul Brand, The Gift of Pain: Why We Hurt and What We Can Do About It

“It is a distortion to picture the human being as a teetering, fallible contraption, always needing watching and patching, always on the verge of flapping to pieces; this is the doctrine that people hear most often, and most eloquently, on all our infirmation media. . . . The great secret of medicine, known to doctors but still hidden from the public, is that most things get better by themselves. Lewis Thomas”
― Paul Brand, The Gift of Pain: Why We Hurt and What We Can Do About It

“Treating a disease and treating a person are very different concerns, because recovery depends in large part on the mind and spirit of the patient. Suffering, a state of mind, involves the entire person.”
― Paul Brand, The Gift of Pain: Why We Hurt and What We Can Do About It

“Paradoxically, pain seems like something done to us, though in reality we have done it to ourselves, manufacturing the sensation. Whatever we might conceive of as “pain” occurs in the mind.”
― Paul Brand, The Gift of Pain: Why We Hurt and What We Can Do About It

“The first transplant recipients did not die because their new kidneys failed, but rather because their bodies would not be fooled. Though the new kidney cells looked and acted in every respect like the old ones, they did not belong. Transplant surgeons must now give the recipient immunosuppressant drugs for the rest of the patient’s life”
― Paul Brand, Fearfully and Wonderfully: The Marvel of Bearing God's Image