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“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.
Yet it remains the dream of every young doctor to discover a new disease. That is the fastest and surest way to gain prominence within the medical profession. Practically speaking, it is much better to discover a new disease than to find a cure for an old one; your cure will be tested, disputed, and argued over for years, while a new disease is readily and rapidly accepted.
he’d better get used to the idea of people dying in front of him, lots of people. And he’d better get used to the idea that he could make a mistake, because they happened. Sometimes the mistakes were balder than others, but it was just degree.
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.
We are all tied to the past, individually and collectively. The past shows through in the very structure of our bones, the distribution of our hair, and the coloring of our skin, as well as the way we walk, stand, eat, dress—and think.
Many things in life are difficult to live down, but nothing is more difficult than a name.
The Passing of the Buck is a time-honored ceremony, to be observed in silence.
I guess I don’t like people much; maybe that’s why I became a pathologist in the first place.
Society will only act out of fear and gross guilt. We are attuned to large figures; small statistics don’t impress us. Who’d give a damn if Hitler had only killed ten thousand Jews?”
“The trouble with this country,” he said, “is that the women have no guts. They’d rather slink off and have a dangerous, illegal operation performed than change the laws. The legislators are all men, and men don’t bear the babies; they can afford to be moralistic. So can the priests: if you had women priests, you’d see a hell of a quick change in religion. But politics and religion are dominated by the men, and the women are reluctant to push too hard. Which is bad, because abortion is their business—their infants, their bodies, their risk. If a million women a year wrote letters to their
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There was that slightly supercilious look in her eyes that all researchers get when they are around clinicians. Clinicians don’t use their minds, you see. They fool with dirty, unscientific things like patients. A researcher, on the other hand, inhabits a world of pure, satisfying intellectualism.
It is natural to expect innovation from the young, but in medicine this has not been easy, for the old doctors train the young ones, and too often the students become carbon copies of their teachers.
“You talk like a psychiatrist.” “We all do, these days.”
because there were millions of ambulances, and millions of people, every day, at every hospital. Eventually, I did forget. Then I was all right.