Sublime

“Writing is like driving at night in the fog,” E. L. Doctorow once observed. “You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” The same might be said of becoming a doctor—and a person.

Our patients’ lives and identities may be in our hands, yet death always wins.

It’s often noted that “practice” as it relates to medicine has two meanings: the act of caring for patients and the doctor’s never-ending process of perfecting his or her craft. But there’s a third meaning, too, one I’m only now appreciating as I contemplate the end of my career. Medicine is a practice in the way that yoga or meditation is for many

In each situation, there’s a calculation to make, a subjective litmus test we use to assess the value of the disclosure: Is this information helpful for the patient to have?

Morantz-Sanchez quotes Professor Henry Hartshorne, delivering the 1872 commencement address at the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania: It is not always the most logical, but often the most discerning physician who succeeds best at the bedside. Medicine is, indeed, a science, but its practice is an art. Those who bring the quick eye, the

I knew that these patients, the so-called worried well, no less than the very ill patients I’d once taken care of, were worthy of my compassion and reassurance, but I found myself struggling to provide it. Didn’t these people understand how lucky they were? The gap between what I knew I should feel and what I actually felt distressed me.

the unbearable about-ness of being. By “about-ness” I meant that I felt disconnected from myself, abstracted from my own life.

What it’s a perfect example of is that doctors shouldn’t take care of their own families.