You see, when medicine works, it is blessed science, and when it fails, it is witchcraft. – Polidori

Before you examine the body of a patient, be patient to learn his story. For once you learn his story, you will also come to know his body.

There is no body cavity that cannot be reached with a number fourteen needle and a good strong arm.

Then the weeks rolled by in a sinister psych ward haze filled with white-coated orderlies and rocking whack-job patients torn straight from some old Jack Nicholson film, all anti-psychotic meds and padded lonely cells…

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...

[2. SQUAT PRESS TO THROW WITH MEDICINE BALL Holding a 14-pound ball, Crawford squats, then jumps straight up while throwing the ball upward. He does it five times and then switches to a six-pound ball...

Unreason is an essential medicine as long as you do not overdose.

Männliches Schuldverweigerungs-Syndrom”, erklärte mein Vater. “Von 2054 an ist das eine medizinisch anerkannte Krankheit.

Swords, Lances, arrows, machine guns, and even high explosives have had far less power over the fates of nations than the typhus louse, the plague flea, and the yellow-fever mosquito. Civilizations have retreated from the...

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...

I am afraid that those comments go back to the late 80’s. At that time I was a skeptic — the argument based on Koch’s postulates to try to distinguish between cause and association. …...

How do you tell the psychiatrists from the patients in the hospital?The patients get better and leave.

The nineteenth century is called the century of hygiene, and the twentieth is the century of medicine. The twenty-first century may be the century of behavioral change. Changing everyday, long-term behaviors–how we exercise, what we...

Our health care approaches squander billions on extravagant treatment regimes that end up accomplishing little, as a society we refuse to adopt the small, even tiny adjustments that could easily reduce the clawing uncertainties that...

The physical shape of Mollies paralyses and contortions fit the pattern of late-nineteenth-century hysteria as well — in particular the phases of “grand hysteria” described by Jean-Martin Charcot, a French physician who became world-famous in...

I critique market-based medicine not because I haven’t seen its heights but because I’ve seen its depths.

Emblematic of this era was the prolific Viennese surgeon Theodor Billroth. Born in 1821, Billroth studied music and surgery with almost equal verve. (The professions still often go hand in hand. Both push manual skill...