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

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.

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.

And then by the end of the third year they completely lose that ability, partly because we teach them the specialized language of medicine.

We think too small, like the frog at the bottom of the well.

The bottom line is what we do might not be the safest so there is always some risk but we are ready to take that into account because we love racing and we love motor sports and it is dangerous.

To me, nothing else about a tree is so remarkable as the extreme delicacy of the mechanism by which it grows and lives.

In this universe the top end is light and the bottom end is real hard stuff.

The fine, hair-like rootlets at the bottom and the microscopical cells of the leaves at the top.

Any journey around Islington involves hundreds of speed bumps that seem to tear the bottom of your car off.

The role of humour is to make people fall down and writhe on the Axminster, and that is the top and bottom of it.

One recipe for happiness is to have to sense of entitlement.’ To this she added a star and noted at the bottom of the page: ‘This is not a lesson I have ever been in a position to learn.