Frank T. Vertosick Jr.

“Failure instructs better than success. A single death shapes the surgeon’s psyche in a way that fifty “saves” cannot.”
― Frank T. Vertosick Jr., When the Air Hits Your Brain: Tales from Neurosurgery

“facts matter a great deal. What a patient does for a living, what his background is, what level of education he has achieved…all of these issues must be addressed in great detail in order to put his complaints and his disease in the proper context. If I ask a man to take the square root of 100 and he cannot, I might take this as proof of a left-hemispheric brain tumor, unless I know that he has worked on a farm since childhood and never attended school. Likewise, I might find it normal that a patient could not tell me the current exchange rate of the pound in Japanese yen. But if I knew that person was a merchant banker, on the other hand, ignorance of this fact would indicate a grave illness indeed! Americans have grown so dependent upon their scanning toys that they fail to view the patient as a multidimensional person. To have the audacity to cut into a person’s brain without the slightest clue of his life, his occupation…I find that most simply appalling.” These”
― Frank T. Vertosick Jr., When the Air Hits Your Brain: Tales from Neurosurgery