Your Life in My Hands Quotes

“Women, as we know, used to be judged incapable of medicine. That changed in 1876, when, after a tenacious fight led by Britain’s first female doctor, Elizabeth Garret Anderson, the law was changed to prohibit women’s exclusion from medical schools. Now, more than 140 years later, female medical students outnumber men. Yet, according to Lawson, our predisposition to avoid antisocial hours and put family before career means we are more”
― Rachel Clarke, Your Life in My Hands: A Junior Doctor's Story

“Using fear to build political capital is a tactic as old as politics.”
― Rachel Clarke, Your Life in My Hands: A Junior Doctor's Story

“In medicine, needless to say, the moment you feel as if you’ve mastered something is invariably the point at which your next experience will knock you straight back down to earth.”
― Rachel Clarke, Your Life in My Hands: A Junior Doctor's Story

“Perhaps it is the fear of being seen to do the wrong thing – the embarrassment of mistaking a patient’s minor unwellness for a full-blown emergency – that holds young doctors back from calling the cavalry. This reticence has the potential to cost patients their lives.”
― Rachel Clarke, Your Life in My Hands: A Junior Doctor's Story

“the most frightening experience of my professional life was not those hours spent under fire in Congo’s killing fields but my first night on call in a UK teaching hospital.”
― Rachel Clarke, Your Life in My Hands: A Junior Doctor's Story