A Case of Need

by Michael Crichton

Anthracosis is accumulation of carbon particles in the lung. Once you gulp carbon down, either as cigarette smoke or city dirt, your body never gets rid of it. It just stays in your lungs.

All surgeons have persecution complexes anyway. Ask the psychiatrists.

“Morality must keep up with technology, because if a person is faced with the choice of being moral and dead or immoral and alive, they’ll choose life every time.

Sounds like Belview in NYC

IT TAKES THIRTEEN YEARS from the time you leave college to the time you become a cardiac surgeon.

It takes a certain kind of man to assume this burden, to set his sights on such a distant goal. By the time he is ready to begin surgery on his own, he has become another person, almost a new breed, estranged by his experience and his dedication from other men. In a sense, that is part of the training: surgeons are lonely men.

or woman

It takes a certain kind of man to assume this burden, to set his sights on such a distant goal. By the time he is ready to begin surgery on his own, he has become another person, almost a new breed, estranged by his experience and his dedication from other men. In a sense, that is part of the training: surgeons are lonely men.

and women

Fortunately, history judges men by their actions, not their motivations.

But there is another face to Boston, a darker face, which lies hidden in the pillory, the stocks, the dunking stool, and the witch hunts. Hardly a man now alive can look at these devices of torture for what they are: evidences of obsession, neurosis, and perverse cruelty. They are proofs of a society encircled by fear of sin, damnation, hellfire, disease, and Indians—in roughly that order. A tense, fearful, suspicious society. In short, a society of reactionary religious fanatics.

Boston was once a swamp.

Boston, no matter how hard it tries, cannot quite elude Puritanism and become English again.

Many things in life are difficult to live down, but nothing is more difficult than a name.

I was reminded that surgeons were the last autocrats in society,

it has become clear that, like it or not, doctors are going to have to produce better medical care for more people than they ever have before.

too often the students become carbon copies of their teachers.

That isn't always a bad thing. I had a brilliant Dr., who taught his successor well!

I feel that a man’s reasons for doing something are less important than the ultimate value of what he does.

THERE IS NO SENSE OF TIME IN A HOSPITAL. One day blends into the next;

So true!

Cops and Doctors

Interesting thought.

The conclusion of the hospital staff was that probably the man had received a good kick in the stomach by the police, after he had been examined.

The earliest surgeons were not doctors at all; they were barbers. Their surgery was primitive, consisting largely of amputations, blood-letting, and wound-dressing.

How interesting.

Now, of course, surgeons are not barbers, or vice versa. But the barbers retain the symbol of their old trade—the red-and-white-striped pole which represents the bloody white dressings of the battlefield.

X is the most important letter of the alphabet in medicine, because of its common use in abbreviations. Use ranges from the straightforward “Polio x3” for three polio vaccinations, to “Discharged to Ward X,” a common euphemism for the morgue. But there are many others: dx is diagnosis; px, prognosis; Rx, therapy; sx, symptoms; hx, history; mx, metastases; fx, fractures.

“obtunded.

Obtuse

FLK, which means “Funny-looking kid.”

That's a funny abbreviation

It mostly is, but fortunately, times are changing.

How long a period? Is he espousing infanticide as well?