When the Air Hits Your Brain: Tales from Neurosurgery

by Frank T. Vertosick Jr.

There is a profound difference between pain and suffering. All animals feel pain. Only humans suffer. Pain is a physical sensation; suffering is an emotional state induced by pain. Suffering is pain coupled with uncertainty, depression, frustration, anger, fear, despair. We can have intense pain but not suffer.

Hippocrates once said that the chief function of medicine is to entertain patients until they heal themselves.

The more bizarre the description of the pain, the more likely it is to be a psychiatric delusion.

Death is not a flaw, a failure of biology, but an essential design feature for constant existence on an inconstant earth.