Diana

“How can I accept a world where over a million people will die this year for want of a cure that has existed for nearly a century?”
― John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection

“In 2016, a group of doctors surveyed 222 white medical students and residents on their beliefs about their patients’ bodies, asking them to judge the veracity of statements such as “Black people’s blood coagulates more quickly than whites’ ” and “Blacks’ nerve endings are less sensitive than whites’.” Half of the students and residents ascribed to at least one of these false beliefs. Like the doctor who brutalized John Brown, 40 percent of the first-year medical students and 25 percent of the residents agreed with the statement “Blacks’ skin is thicker than whites’.” These beliefs had real-world consequences: when given two mock medical scenarios, one featuring a Black patient and one featuring a white patient, the students and residents who endorsed more of the false beliefs assumed that the Black patient felt less pain than her white counterpart. Worse, they were less likely to adequately treat the Black patient’s pain than they were the white patient’s. Even now, medicine seems in thrall to Mitchell’s assertion that not all pain is equal, disbelieves the essential truth that the “capacity to suffer” is a human universal.”
― Pria Anand, The Mind Electric: A Neurologist on the Strangeness and Wonder of Our Brains

“But history, alas, is not merely a record of what we do, but also a record of what is done to us.”
― John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection

“I’ve suffered from anxiety and depression since I was twelve years old. The pain is a fanged beast that I’ve battled a hundred times throughout the years, and every time I think I’ve cut it down for good, it reanimates and launches itself at my throat again.”
― Stephanie Foo, What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma