Rachel Clarke > Quotes

“Women, as we know, used to be judged incapable of medicine. That changed in 1876, when, after a tenacious fight led by Britain’s first female doctor, Elizabeth Garret Anderson, the law was changed to prohibit women’s exclusion from medical schools. Now, more than 140 years later, female medical students outnumber men. Yet, according to Lawson, our predisposition to avoid antisocial hours and put family before career means we are more”
― Rachel Clarke, Your Life in My Hands: A Junior Doctor's Story

“The crushing realisation that someone you love so unconditionally is suffering and you can’t stop it is terrible.”
― Rachel Clarke, The Story of a Heart

“No other part of the human body comes close to matching the metaphorical richness of the human heart. Hearts sing, soar, race, burn, break, bleed, swell, hammer and melt. They can be won or lost, cut or trampled, and hewn from oak or stone or gold. They have a temperature – warm or cold – and can be squeezed, can sink or be thrown away. They are vessels filled not only with blood, but with our sorrows, hopes and fears.”
― Rachel Clarke, The Story of a Heart

“In medicine, needless to say, the moment you feel as if you’ve mastered something is invariably the point at which your next experience will knock you straight back down to earth.”
― Rachel Clarke, Your Life in My Hands: A Junior Doctor's Story

“the most frightening experience of my professional life was not those hours spent under fire in Congo’s killing fields but my first night on call in a UK teaching hospital.”
― Rachel Clarke, Your Life in My Hands: A Junior Doctor's Story

“Using fear to build political capital is a tactic as old as politics.”
― Rachel Clarke, Your Life in My Hands: A Junior Doctor's Story

“Ordinary life, lazily unspooling,”
― Rachel Clarke, The Story of a Heart

“no matter how little time a person has left – or even if their death defies the ongoing beat of their heart – a human being still has value. A human being still deserves our love and care. If we live on past our deaths in the minds of those who love us – and isn’t this the only kind of legacy, in the end, that counts?”
― Rachel Clarke, The Story of a Heart

“But what dominates palliative medicine is not the proximity to death, but the best bits of living. Kindness, courage, love, tenderness – these are the qualities that so often saturate a person’s last days. It can be chaotic, messy, almost violent with grief, but I am surrounded at work by human beings at their most remarkable, unable to retreat from the fact and the ache of our impermanence, yet getting on with living and loving all the same.”
― Rachel Clarke, Dear Life: A Doctor’s Story of Love and Loss

“Grief, as nurses know better than anyone, is the form love takes when someone dies. Perhaps grief hurts as much as it ought to – as much and as fiercely as the person who has died was loved.”
― Rachel Clarke, The Story of a Heart

“Perhaps it is the fear of being seen to do the wrong thing – the embarrassment of mistaking a patient’s minor unwellness for a full-blown emergency – that holds young doctors back from calling the cavalry. This reticence has the potential to cost patients their lives.”
― Rachel Clarke, Your Life in My Hands: A Junior Doctor's Story

“they know precisely what these rituals signify. You are loved. You mattered then, and you matter now, and you will matter always, for ever.”
― Rachel Clarke, The Story of a Heart