“He was teaching me how to die, just as he’d taught me how to live.”

The rituals we use for marriage, baptism or inaugurating a president are as elaborate as they are because we associate the ritual with a major life passage, the crossing of a critical threshold, or in other words, with transformation.

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

I still find the best way to understand a hospitalized patient is not by staring at the computer screen but by going to see the patient; it’s only at the bedside that I can figure out what is important.

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.

If it does nothing else, allows one the opportunity to make prolonged observations about one’s fellow travelers.

What we need in medical schools is not to teach empathy, as much as to preserve it.

We come unbidden into this life, and if we are lucky we find a purpose beyond starvation, misery, and early death which, lest we forget, is the common lot.

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?’ ‘

Pray tell us, what’s your favorite number?

Not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny.

Rituals, anthropologists will tell us, are about transformation.

Still, it’s an apt metaphor for our profession. But there’s another kind of hole, and that is the wound that divides family.

We come unbidden into this life, and if we are lucky we find a purpose beyond starvation, misery, and early death which, lest we forget, is the common lot.

The greatest sin is not finding it, ignoring what God made possible in you

Certainly when I got to medical school, I had role models of the kind of physicians I wanted to be.

Now, as to the problem of how much health care costs and how we reform health care … it is another story altogether.