my early education involved a surgeon who, over the years, sent bushel baskets full of normal gallbladders down to the pathology lab in the leading hospital in Lincoln, Nebraska, my grandfather’s town. And, with that permissive quality control for which community hospitals are famous, many years after this surgeon should’ve been removed from the medical staff, he was. One of the doctors who participated in the removal was a family friend, and I asked him, “Did this surgeon think, ‘Here’s a way for me to exercise my talents’”—this guy was very skilled technically—“‘and make a high living by
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