Brandon O
Puzzled by facies
- 1,718
- 337
- 83
Anybody else a quote fan? I like to collect 'em. Nothing's wiser than pithiness and it's a nice way to remember why we're doing the whole medicine thingamajig.
Share 'em if you've got 'em! Here's a few...
May I never see in the patient anything but a fellow creature in pain.
-- Oath of Maimonides
I usually try to imagine what a regular person would do, someone more in tune with the supplies and demands of human nature, and once I realize a regular person would never find himself in this position, I try to think like a hero in the movies.
-- Bringing Out the Dead
I make my patients feel like they’re still part of life, part of some grand nutty scheme instead of alone with their diseases. With me, they still feel part of the human race.
-- The House of God, Sam Shem
Once, when I mentioned this to second-year medical students, one raised his hand, "We learned empathy already." What? "Yes, last year in interviewing. Empathy is when you repeat the last three words the patient says and nod your head."
-- Sam Shem, Harvard 2009 commencement speech
'Kindness' covers all of my political beliefs. No need to spell them out. I believe that if, at the end, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn’t always know this and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.
-- Roger Ebert
It is more important to know what sort of person has a disease than to know what sort of disease a person has.
-- Hippocrates
At times, in medicine, you feel you are inside a colossal and impossibly complex machine whose gears will turn for you only according to their own arbitrary rhythm. The notion that human caring, the effort to do better for people, might make a difference can seem hopelessly naive. But it isn't.
-- Better, Atul Gawande
The modest merits of this good citizen may, so far as the public are concerned, be summed up in the simple statement that he has saved upwards of 30 lives from drowning. When we consider what are the awards usually apportioned by mankind to the destroyers of their species, the presentation of a gold watch and chain, accompanied by a framed parchment from the Royal Humane Society, in the precincts of a disused School Room, must appear an inadequate acknowledgment of services so signal. But we are new at the business and shall improve as we go forward . . .
There is a hackneyed platitude to the effect that virtue is its own reward, but it is safe to say that the average man does not find such a result sufficient. It might be so in an ideal world inhabited by ideal people, but in this work-a-day world, in addition to the approval of our conscience, we love to have the approval of our fellows and to know that our acts are appreciated, and especially is this the case when we are actuated by altruistic motives. This is, of course, a form of vanity, but then vanity is almost a universal failing.
-- Life of Harry Watts; sixty years sailor & diver, Alfred Spencer
Tracey: When you can't run, you crawl. And when you can't crawl, you... when you can't do that...
Zoe: You find someone to carry you.
-- Firefly, "The Message" (e12)
She felt the familiar calmness of an emergency, but she understood the falseness of that feeling, now that it was her life at stake.
-- Cutting for Stone, Abraham Verghese
You should bother, because EMTs are privileged to play in life's great game. Too many unlucky people watch the action thunder by, stuck at a desk, or watching it on television at home.
-- Kelly Grayson
The most basic job of an EMT is to notice things and then wonder about them
-- Thom ****
. . . until the curtain was rung down on the last act of the drama (and it might have no last act!) he wished the intellectual cripples and the moral hunchbacks not to be jeered at; perhaps they might turn out to be the heroes of the play.
-- George Santayana on William James (quoted in Linda Simon's William James Remembered)
I don't do this STUPID JOB because I want to be LIKED or ACCEPTED or whatever --
although that WOULD be [effing] NICE --
I do this STUPID JOB because I'm DRIVEN to do it --
unlike YOU, I do this stupid, STUPID job because
BECAUSE THIS IS WHAT I AM
-- Empowered, issue 4
You've always perched yourself at a slight angle to the universe.
-- The House of God, Sam Shem
I don’t like hurting people. Is that so hard to understand? When I go to bed at night, I can sleep easily, knowing that I fought for freedom, and for less suffering rather than more. That I stood by someone accused so that he would not have to stand alone.
I can’t know whether anyone is truly guilty or innocent, or what they deserve, and frankly, I don’t care. We all deserve at least one person on the damn planet willing to stand there next to us and fight on our behalf.
-- Danielle E. Sucher
I love you and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it.
-- Scrubs, "My Words of Wisdom" (s06E16)
It was a common practice to light a bonfire close to any shipwreck that could not be rescued immediately. This was done to let the surfmen have enough light to see the shipwreck, help keep the watching surfman warm, and let the survivors of the shipwreck know that they had not been abandoned.
-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_James_(lifesaver)
It seemed a marvel to her that any mortal should suffer for lack of love, and yet she had never known a mortal who didn't feel unloved. There was enough love just in this ugly hallway, she thought, that no one should ever feel the lack of it again. She peered at the parents, imagining their hearts like machines, manufacturing surfeit upon surfeit of love for their children, and then wondered how something could be so awesome and so utterly powerless.
-- Chris Adrian, "A Tiny Feast," (The New Yorker April 20, 2009)
Share 'em if you've got 'em! Here's a few...
May I never see in the patient anything but a fellow creature in pain.
-- Oath of Maimonides
I usually try to imagine what a regular person would do, someone more in tune with the supplies and demands of human nature, and once I realize a regular person would never find himself in this position, I try to think like a hero in the movies.
-- Bringing Out the Dead
I make my patients feel like they’re still part of life, part of some grand nutty scheme instead of alone with their diseases. With me, they still feel part of the human race.
-- The House of God, Sam Shem
Once, when I mentioned this to second-year medical students, one raised his hand, "We learned empathy already." What? "Yes, last year in interviewing. Empathy is when you repeat the last three words the patient says and nod your head."
-- Sam Shem, Harvard 2009 commencement speech
'Kindness' covers all of my political beliefs. No need to spell them out. I believe that if, at the end, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn’t always know this and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.
-- Roger Ebert
It is more important to know what sort of person has a disease than to know what sort of disease a person has.
-- Hippocrates
At times, in medicine, you feel you are inside a colossal and impossibly complex machine whose gears will turn for you only according to their own arbitrary rhythm. The notion that human caring, the effort to do better for people, might make a difference can seem hopelessly naive. But it isn't.
-- Better, Atul Gawande
The modest merits of this good citizen may, so far as the public are concerned, be summed up in the simple statement that he has saved upwards of 30 lives from drowning. When we consider what are the awards usually apportioned by mankind to the destroyers of their species, the presentation of a gold watch and chain, accompanied by a framed parchment from the Royal Humane Society, in the precincts of a disused School Room, must appear an inadequate acknowledgment of services so signal. But we are new at the business and shall improve as we go forward . . .
There is a hackneyed platitude to the effect that virtue is its own reward, but it is safe to say that the average man does not find such a result sufficient. It might be so in an ideal world inhabited by ideal people, but in this work-a-day world, in addition to the approval of our conscience, we love to have the approval of our fellows and to know that our acts are appreciated, and especially is this the case when we are actuated by altruistic motives. This is, of course, a form of vanity, but then vanity is almost a universal failing.
-- Life of Harry Watts; sixty years sailor & diver, Alfred Spencer
Tracey: When you can't run, you crawl. And when you can't crawl, you... when you can't do that...
Zoe: You find someone to carry you.
-- Firefly, "The Message" (e12)
She felt the familiar calmness of an emergency, but she understood the falseness of that feeling, now that it was her life at stake.
-- Cutting for Stone, Abraham Verghese
You should bother, because EMTs are privileged to play in life's great game. Too many unlucky people watch the action thunder by, stuck at a desk, or watching it on television at home.
-- Kelly Grayson
The most basic job of an EMT is to notice things and then wonder about them
-- Thom ****
. . . until the curtain was rung down on the last act of the drama (and it might have no last act!) he wished the intellectual cripples and the moral hunchbacks not to be jeered at; perhaps they might turn out to be the heroes of the play.
-- George Santayana on William James (quoted in Linda Simon's William James Remembered)
I don't do this STUPID JOB because I want to be LIKED or ACCEPTED or whatever --
although that WOULD be [effing] NICE --
I do this STUPID JOB because I'm DRIVEN to do it --
unlike YOU, I do this stupid, STUPID job because
BECAUSE THIS IS WHAT I AM
-- Empowered, issue 4
You've always perched yourself at a slight angle to the universe.
-- The House of God, Sam Shem
I don’t like hurting people. Is that so hard to understand? When I go to bed at night, I can sleep easily, knowing that I fought for freedom, and for less suffering rather than more. That I stood by someone accused so that he would not have to stand alone.
I can’t know whether anyone is truly guilty or innocent, or what they deserve, and frankly, I don’t care. We all deserve at least one person on the damn planet willing to stand there next to us and fight on our behalf.
-- Danielle E. Sucher
I love you and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it.
-- Scrubs, "My Words of Wisdom" (s06E16)
It was a common practice to light a bonfire close to any shipwreck that could not be rescued immediately. This was done to let the surfmen have enough light to see the shipwreck, help keep the watching surfman warm, and let the survivors of the shipwreck know that they had not been abandoned.
-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_James_(lifesaver)
It seemed a marvel to her that any mortal should suffer for lack of love, and yet she had never known a mortal who didn't feel unloved. There was enough love just in this ugly hallway, she thought, that no one should ever feel the lack of it again. She peered at the parents, imagining their hearts like machines, manufacturing surfeit upon surfeit of love for their children, and then wondered how something could be so awesome and so utterly powerless.
-- Chris Adrian, "A Tiny Feast," (The New Yorker April 20, 2009)
kinda.
