The House of God

by Samuel Shem

From that night on, I might be everything else, but I’d never again be panicked in the House of God. It was a thrilling thought—almost like in the intern novels and in the inside of Howard’s skull and in my father’s letters—until I realized with alarm that I hadn’t learned how to save anyone at all, not Dr. Sanders or Lazarus or Jimmy or Saul or Anna O., and that what I was thrilled about was learning how to save myself.

Talking about medicine, I told him with bitterness about my growing cynicism about what I could do, and he said, “No, we don’t cure. I never bought that either. I went through the same cynicism—all that training, and then this helplessness. And yet, in spite of all our doubt, we can give something. Not cure, no. What sustains us is when we find a way to be compassionate, to love. And the most loving thing we do is to be with a patient, like you are being with me.”

The main source of illness in this world is the doctor’s own illness: his compulsion to try to cure and his fraudulent belief that he can.

within limits, fatigue is mental, not physiological.

how can we care for patients if’n nobody cares for us?”