Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio describes emotions as the "continuous musical line of our minds, the unstoppable humming." This basso continuo thrums along while doctors make a steady stream of conscious medical decisions.
The disease of the soul is both more common and more deadly than the disease of the body. Just as medicine is the art devoted to healing the body, so philosophy is the art devoted to healing the soul, curing it of improper emotions, false...
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Neel Burton
Popular medicine and popular morality belong together and ought not to be evaluated so differently as they still are: both are the most dangerous pseudo-sciences.
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Friedrich Nietzsche
It is very expensive to give bad medical care to poor people in a rich country.
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Paul Farmer
Swords, Lances, arrows, machine guns, and even high explosives have had far less power over the fates of nations than the typhus louse, the plague flea, and the yellow-fever mosquito. Civilizations have retreated from the plasmodium of malaria, and armies have crumbled into rabbles under...
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Hans Zinsser
One of the essential qualities of the clinician is interest in humanity, for the secret of the care of the patient is in caring for the patient.
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Elizabeth Bradley
More Quotes By Danielle Ofri
Suddenly, I was plunged back into an avid learning environment, starting at the bottom and working my way painstakingly up the mountain. The thrill of learning and accomplishing stimulated me so much that the work was pleasurable.
The very fact that these doctors continuing to be doctors--highly successful ones--despite their errors and their accompanying assaults on their self-definion would itself be a potent lesson to the students and interns. It is possible to hold one's head up after an error, to admit...
How the sadness is handled by the physician has a powerful impact on the medical care received by the patients. If the grief is relentlessly suppressed--as in Eva's experience during residency--the result can be a numb physician who is unable to invest in a new...
Grief ate at these doctors, distracting them from both their families and their patients. Many reported withdrawing from emotional involvement with their patients and that their patients had noticed they weren't fully present.
Empathy--the ability to identify with someone else's suffering--is certainly a prerequisite for a genuine apology.
