…a world where a sparrow’s fate and that of a man can be decided in the blink of a cat’s eye, such is the true measure of time.

My desire to be a physician had a lot to do with that sense of medicine as a ministry of healing, not just a science. And not even just a science and an art, but...

Hema thought of Shiva, her personal deity, and how the only sensible response to the madness of life . . . was to cultivate a kind of madness within, to perform the mad dance of...

We stopped you from going, didn’t we? Me and Shiva. Our birth?”Don’t be silly. Can you imagine me giving up this?” he said sweeping his hand to indicate family, Missing, the home he’d made out...

So I consider myself a dog person. Kind of. Had dogs when I was a kid, but my parents would never have dreamed of having them in the house.

Children were the foot wedged in the closing door, the glimmer of hope that in reincarnation there would be some house to go to, even if one came back as a dog, or a mouse,...

I was taking care of people my age who were dying. The constant feeling, hearing from them, was that life is transient and can end very quickly, so don’t postpone your dreams.

We have the sense that medical students come to medicine with a great capacity to understand the suffering of patients. And then by the end of the third year they completely lose that ability, partly...

… telling herself stories about herself in a singsong voice, creating her own mythology.

The incredible cinematography makes ‘A Walk to Beautiful’ almost like a poem; there is a tenderness on display that seems to emanate from the camera. There is also great sensitivity to the women whose stories...

it was all I had, all I’ve ever had, the only currency, the only proof that I was alive. Memory.” p 380

I don’t think you can be a physician and not see yourself reflected in your patient’s illness. How would I deal with the kind of news I’d given Mr. Walters?

Literature is a beautiful way of keeping the imagination alive, of visiting worlds you would never have time to in your day-to-day life. It keeps you abreast of a wider spectrum of human activities.

A man is only as rich as the number of children he fathers. After all, what else do we leave behind in this world…

In America, we have always taken it as an article of faith that we ‘battle’ cancer; we attack it with knives, we poison it with chemotherapy or we blast it with radiation. If we are...

When I use the word ‘healing,’ by that I mean that every disease has a physical element that we’re very good at handling, but there’s always a sense of the violation. ‘Why me?’ ‘Why is...

Tell us please, what treatment in an emergency is administered by ear?”….I met his gaze and I did not blink. “Words of comfort,” I said to my father.

There are moments as a teacher when I’m conscious that I’m trotting out the same exact phrase my professor used with me years ago. It’s an eerie feeling, as if my old mentor is not...

The world turns on our every action, and our every omission, whether we know it or not.

I’m a great believer in geography being destiny.

I think we can see how blessed we are in America to have access to the kind of health care we do if we are insured, and even if uninsured, how there is a safety...

The master-word is Work, a little one, as I have said, but fraught with momentous sequences if you can but write it on the tablets of your hearts, and bind it upon your foreheads.

My deceased patients have taught me over the years to believe in the glass half full, to make good use of the time we have, to be generous – that was their lesson for the...

I think legislation needs to put an end to doctors profiting on businesses to which they can funnel patients – that is business, not medicine. If you try to call it medicine, then it is...

My father, for whose skills as a surgeon I have the deepest respect, says, “The operation with the best outcome is the one you decide not to do.” Knowing when not to operate, knowing when...

I think America is really in denial about the degree to which residents, particularly foreign medical graduates, man the county hospitals of this country, and but for their services, I’m not sure how exactly we...

I welcomed my slavish existence as a surgical resident, the never-ending work, the cries that kept me in the present, the immersion in blood, pus, and tears — the fluids in which one dissolved all...

You live it forward, but understand it backward.

Patients know in a heartbeat if they’re getting a clumsy exam.

Modern society has evolved to the point where we counter the old-fashioned fatalism surrounding the word ‘cancer’ by embracing the idea of the Uber-mind – that our will possesses nearly supernatural powers.

Everyone needed an obsession.

For one who has an interest in the body as text, airports are treasure troves of information. It seems almost un-American to enjoy delays, and perhaps enjoy is not the best word, but certainly a...

I love to read poetry but I haven’t written anything that I’m willing to show anybody.

No blade can puncture the human heart like the well-chosen words of a spiteful son.

Lets take away the incentives to do ‘to’ patients and instead create incentives to do ‘for’ patients, to be ‘with’ patients. We don’t need to do comparative effectiveness trials to see if that works; we...

Surely you couldn’t be a good doctor and a terrible human being—surely the laws of man, if not God, didn’t allow it.

Life, too, is like that. You live it forward, but understand it backward. It is only when you stop and look to the rear that you see the corpse caught under your wheel.

My sense is that the wonderful technology that we have to visualize the inside of the body often leaves physicians feeling that the exam is a waste of time and so they may shortchange the...

Medicine may be the lens through which I see the world, but since I think of medicine as ‘life +’, a place where life is exaggerated and seen at its most vital and poignant, I’ll...

Doubt is a first cousin to faith, Ghosh. To have faith, you have to suspend your disbelief.

There’s something universal about illness… Whether you like it, at some level all patients are saying, ‘Daddy, Mommy, help me, tell me it’s going to be alright.’

Lest it sound as if I resent my day job, I have to say that my day job is the reason I write, and it has been the best thing for me as a writer.

Superorganism. A biologist coined that word for our great African ant colonies, claiming that consciousness and intelligence resided not in the individual ant but in the collective ant mind. The trail of red taillights stretching...

By visiting patients in their home, by helping them come to terms with their illness, I could heal when I could not cure.

[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,...

The key to your happiness is to own your slippers, own who you are, own how you look, own your family, own the talents you have, and own the ones you don’t. If you keep...

Students undergo a conversion in the third year of medical school – not pre-clinical to clinical, but pre-cynical to cynical.

We’re now able to show that the words of comfort trigger biological reactions which are the very things that you want, and you can use drugs to get there, or you can use words of...

There is a point when grief exceeds the human capacity to emote, and as a result one is strangely composed-

What we need in medical schools is not to teach empathy, as much as to preserve it – the process of learning huge volumes of information about disease, of learning a specialized language, can ironically...