“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 ritual.”

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.

Finishing a good book is like leaving a good friend.

I was the world’s ugliest baby. I have photos of my folks leaving the hospital with sacks over their heads… I asked my mother how to turn off the electric fan. She said ‘Grab the blade!

I think about my sons and the legacy I have to leave for them – and it always brings me back to reality.

I don’t leave home without my Skullcandy Crushers.

The miscegenation laws of the South only operate against the legitimate union of the races; they leave the white man free to seduce all the colored girls he can, but it is death to the colored man who yields to the force and advances of a similar attraction in white women.

I’d have wasted a lot of time and trouble before I learned that the best way to take all people, black or white, is to take them for what they think they are, then leave them alone.

The most important thing of all is my parents were able to leave all four of their children better off than themselves. That story has a name, it’s called the American dream.

Leave your drugs in the chemist’s pot if you can heal the patient with food.