Nikki > Nikki's Quotes

“Wherever the art of Medicine is loved, there is also a love of Humanity. ”
― Hippocrates

“We look for medicine to be an orderly field of knowledge and procedure. But it is not. It is an imperfect science, an enterprise of constantly changing knowledge, uncertain information, fallible individuals, and at the same time lives on the line. There is science in what we do, yes, but also habit, intuition, and sometimes plain old guessing. The gap between what we know and what we aim for persists. And this gap complicates everything we do.”
― Atul Gawande, Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science

“The life so short, the craft so long to learn.”
― Hippocrates

“The physician should not treat the disease but the patient who is suffering from it”
― Moses Maimonides

“The most exquisite pleasure in the practice of medicine comes from nudging a layman in the direction of terror, then bringing him back to safety again.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

“Betterment is perpetual labor. The world is chaotic, disorganized, and vexing, and medicine is nowhere spared that reality. To complicate matters, we in medicine are also only human ourselves. We are distractible, weak, and given to our own concerns. Yet still, to live as a doctor is to live so that one's life is bound up in others' and in science and in the messy, complicated connection between the two It is to live a life of responsibility. The question then, is not whether one accepts the responsibility. Just by doing this work, one has. The question is, having accepted the responsibility, how one does such work well.”
― Atul Gawande, Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance

“In 1736 I lost one of my sons, a fine boy of four years old, by the small-pox, taken in the common way. I long regretted bitterly, and still regret that I had not given it to him by inoculation. This I mention for the sake of parents who omit that operation, on the supposition that they should never forgive themselves if a child died under it; my example showing that the regret may be the same either way, and that, therefore, the safer should be chosen.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“You cannot separate passion from pathology any more than you can separate a person's spirit from his body.”
― Richard Selzer, Letters To A Young Doctor

“Life is short, art long, opportunity fleeting, experience treacherous, judgment difficult.”
― Hippocrates

“Like plumbing, medicine is a profession where you learn early on not to put your fingers in your mouth.”
― Diana Gabaldon, Written in My Own Heart's Blood

“What the sick need is teachers not treaters, health schools not hospitals, instruction not treatment, education in right living not training the sick habit. Both they and their advisors must get rid of the curing idea and the practices built up thereon.”
― Herbert M. Shelton, Getting Well

“Western doctors are like poor plumbers. They treat a splashing tube by cleaning up the water. These plumbers are extremely apt at drying up the water, constantly inventing new, expensive, and refined methods of drying up water. Somebody should teach them how to close the tap.”
― Denis Parsons Burkitt

“The poets did well to conjoin music and medicine, in Apollo, because the office of medicine is but to tune the curious harp of man's body and reduce it to harmony.”
― Francis Bacon, The Oxford Francis Bacon IV: The Advancement of Learning

“Where there is ignorance, sickness will thrive.”
― Osamu Tezuka, Ode to Kirihito

“First do no harm. -Hippocrates
Second, do some good. -Anne M. Lipton, M.D., Ph.D.”
― Anne M. Lipton, The Common Sense Guide to Dementia For Clinicians and Caregivers

“The possibilities and probabilities are all we have to work with in medicine, though. What we are drawn to in this imperfect science, what we in fact covet in our way, is the alterable moment-the fragile but crystalline opportunity for one's know-how, ability, or just gut instinct to change the course of another's life for the better.”
― Atul Gawande, Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science

“For where else can I go to sample daily the richness of life in all its profound chaos?”
― Theresa Brown, Critical Care: A New Nurse Faces Death, Life, and Everything in Between

“Certainly the primary imperative of a physician is to be skilled in medical science, but if he or she does not probe a patient's soul, then the doctor's care is given without caring, and part of the sacred mission of healing is missing.”
― Jerome E. Groopman

“[American ambulance crews] salvaged people we'd never see in Missing, because no one would have tied to bring them to a hospital. Judging someone to be beyond help never crossed the minds of police, firemen, or doctors here.”
― Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone