Sublime

I find my patients much more interesting than their diseases.

on the subject, notes that some of the medical students who interviewed her when she worked as a standardized patient “seem to understand that empathy is always perched precariously between gift and invasion.”

even at one of the world’s great academic medical centers you can easily declare yourself an expert in a condition that no one else wants to deal with.

The medical uncertainty compounds patients’ own uncertainty.

Hope is a central human emotion, misunderstood and often mistaken for optimism, as Jerome Groopman reminds us in The Anatomy of Hope.

The experience of the body is never only about the body.