“At times, with today’s advances in technology, medicine in rural America looks very like it does in America’s cities, but the variety of practices is enormous.”

If you keep saying your slippers aren’t yours, then you’ll die searching, you’ll die bitter, always feeling you were promised more.

The flip side of suicide is that it leaves a lingering question in the minds of the people who survived. Its like a cancer thats metastasized. The suicide is the cancer and the metastasis is all these people saying, Why? Why? Why?

The crookedness of the serpent is still straight enough to slide through the snake hole.

It was all I had, all I’ve ever had, the only currency, the only proof that I was alive. Memory.

For one who has an interest in the body as text, airports are treasure troves of information.

I had an uncle who, looking back, was probably not the most-educated physician around but he carried it off so well.

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

The bottom line: health care reform is about the patient, not about the physician.

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.

A rich man’s faults are covered with money, but a surgeon’s faults are covered with earth.

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 could manage.

My intent wasn’t to save the world as much as to heal myself. Few doctors will admit this, certainly not young ones, but subconsciously, in entering the profession

Why settle for ‘Three Blind Mice’ when you can can play the ‘Gloria’? No, not Bach’s ‘Gloria.’ Yours! Your ‘Gloria’ lives within you.

What treatment in an emergency is administered by ear?

Why is my leg broken on the ski trip and not anyone else’s?’ And I think that medicine has done a terrible job of addressing that spiritual violation.

In writing, as in medicine, there are no short cuts. You need stamina.

Always give a word or sign of salute when meeting or passing a friend, or even a stranger, if in a lonely place.

Witches is being sold as an account of the Belvoir scandals, but in truth, Tracy Borman has written a thorough and beautifully researched social history of the early 1600s, taking in everything from folk medicine to James I’s sex life.

Have you more faith in a spoonful of medicine than in the power that animates the living world?

The AMA virtually stopped the Rife treatment in 1939, first by threatening the physicians using Rife’s instrument, then by forcing Rife into court….

Italians do not regard food as merely fuel. They regard it as medicine for the soul, one of life’s abiding pleasures.

[Economists’ advice] is something like patent medicine – people know it is largely manufactured by quacks and that a good percentage of the time it won’t work, but they continue to buy the brand whose flavor they like.

Grief is itself a medicine.

Dread not infanticide; the crime is imaginary: we are always mistress of what we carry in our womb, and we do no more harm in destroying this kind of matter than in evacuating another, by medicines, when we feel the need.