A Case of Need Quotes

“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 everytime.”
― Michael Crichton, A Case of Need

“One reason abortion remained illegal was because it was so safe.”
― Michael Crichton, A Case of Need

“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 babies; they can afford to be moralistic.”
― Michael Crichton, A Case of Need

“All heart surgeons are bastards, and Conway is no exception.”
― Michael Crichton, A Case of Need

“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.”
― Jeffery Hudson, A Case of Need

“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.”
― Jeffery Hudson, A Case of Need

“You’re playing the loyal doctor, right down the line. You’re sucking up to the tradition, to the conspiracy of silence. You’d like to see it handled nice and quietly, very diplomatic, with no hard feelings at the end.”
― Michael Crichton, A Case of Need

“I think,” he said, “that a case is decided in the courtroom, not before.”
― Jeffery Hudson, A Case of Need

“the pseudonyms John Lange and Jeffery Hudson, among them A Case of Need, which won the Edgar Award for Best Mystery in 1969.”
― Jeffery Hudson, A Case of Need

“Anyway, it goes like this: there’s this desert prison, see, with an old prisoner, resigned to his life, and a young one just arrived. The young one talks constantly of escape, and, after a few months, he makes a break. He’s gone a week, and then he’s brought back by the guards. He’s half dead, crazy with hunger and thirst. He describes how awful it was to the old prisoner. The endless stretches of sand, no oasis, no signs of life anywhere. The old prisoner listens for a while, then says, ‘Yep. I know. I tried to escape myself, twenty years ago.’ The young prisoner says, ‘You did? Why didn’t you tell me, all these months I was planning my escape? Why didn’t you let me know it was impossible?’ And the old prisoner shrugs, and says, ‘So who publishes negative results?”
― Jeffery Hudson, A Case of Need

“he was continually touching his body, as if to assure himself that he had not disappeared.”
― Jeffery Hudson, A Case of Need

“I’m told it can be done in five.”
― Jeffery Hudson, A Case of Need

“Hospital abortion, for example, must now be regarded as a relatively inexpensive and safe procedure, carrying a mortality rate roughly similar to a tooth extraction. This was not always true, but in the modern context it is, and we must therefore deal with it.”
― Jeffery Hudson, A Case of Need

“house. ‘Slide of”
― Jeffery Hudson, A Case of Need

“1 The fourth class, analgesics, was mostly that old standby, aspirin, synthesized in 1853. Aspirin is as much a wonder drug as any other. It is a painkiller, a swelling-reducer, a fever-breaker, and an antiallergic drug. None of its actions can be explained. 2 See Appendix V: Whites. 3 Injected amphetamines, such as methedrene, intravenously. 4 Psychiatrists have the highest suicide rate of all, more than ten times that of the GP. 5 Defined as a person who becomes more inebriated than his blood alcohol levels would explain. In the most extreme cases, a single drink may make a man a raving, destructive lunatic. 6 The Papp smear is the most accurate diagnostic test in all of medicine.”
― Jeffery Hudson, A Case of Need

“in a pathology building smack of Egyptian embalming chambers. Or something.”
― Jeffery Hudson, A Case of Need

“In retrospect, all of Blake’s arguments seem no more useful or important than watching an athlete exercise in a gym, but at the time they can be fascinating.”
― Jeffery Hudson, A Case of Need

“ALL”
― Jeffery Hudson, A Case of Need

“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.”
― Jeffery Hudson, A Case of Need

“It is a historical truth that a man may do the wrong thing for the right reasons. In that case he loses. Or he may do the right thing for the wrong reasons. In that case, he is a hero.”
― Jeffery Hudson, A Case of Need

“THE LAST TIME ANYONE COUNTED, there were 25,000 named diseases of man, and cures for 5,000 of them.”
― Jeffery Hudson, A Case of Need

“Actually, Boston has some of the nicest cells in America. They have to: lots of famous people have spent time in those cells. Mayors, public officials, people like that. You can’t expect a man to run a decent campaign for reelection if he’s in a lousy cell, can you?”
― Jeffery Hudson, A Case of Need

“Morons,” Conway hissed, “goddamned morons.” He pounded the wall with his fist; bottles in the cabinets rattled.”
― Jeffery Hudson, A Case of Need

“Because whenever I feel the symptoms coming on—the urge to work round the clock, to keep going until midnight, or to come in at five in the morning—I say to myself, it’s just a game. I repeat that over and over. And it works: I settle down.”
― Jeffery Hudson, A Case of Need

“and put”
― Jeffery Hudson, A Case of Need

“Can the drowning save the drowning?”
― Jeffery Hudson, A Case of Need

“Bostonians are inclined to overlook much of the past. Like a slum kid who makes good, the city has swung far from its origins, and attempted to conceal them. As a colony of common men, it has established an untitled aristocracy to rival the most ancient and rigid of Europe. As a city of religion, it has developed a scientific community unrivaled in the East. It is also strongly narcissistic—a trait it shares with another city of questionable origin, San Francisco. Unfortunately for both these cities, they can never quite escape their past. San Francisco cannot quite shake off its booming, crude, gold-rush spirit to become a genteel Eastern town. And Boston, no matter how hard it tries, cannot quite elude Puritanism and become English again.”
― Jeffery Hudson, A Case of Need

“There is something compelling about open-heart surgery, something fantastic and fabulous, a mixture of dream and nightmare, all come true.”
― Jeffery Hudson, A Case of Need

“A doctor cannot change his name after receiving his M.D. degree without invalidating that degree. This means that there is a great rush in the final weeks of med school among doctors flocking into court to change their names before they receive their diplomas. TWELVE THE SUN WAS SETTING, and the light on the quadrangle was turning yellow-gold.”
― Jeffery Hudson, A Case of Need

“his first nonfiction book, Five Patients, and two more John Lange titles, Grave Descend and Drug of Choice. He also wrote Dealing or The Berkeley-to-Boston Forty-Brick Lost-Bag Blues with his brother Douglas, and it was later published under the pseudonym Michael Douglas. After deciding to quit medicine”
― Jeffery Hudson, A Case of Need