Chris Cleave Quotes

A resident's surgical skill is judged by their technique and speed. You can't be sloppy, and you can't be slow.

Dura est manus cirurgi, sed sanans. The hand of the surgeon is hard, but healing.

In cognitively demanding fields, there are no naturals. Nobody walks into an operating room straight out of a surgical rotation and does world-class neurosurgery.

As a surgeon you have to have a controlled arrogance. If it's uncontrolled, you kill people, but you have to be pretty arrogant to saw through a person's chest, take out their heart and believe you can fix it. Then, when you succeed and the patient survives, you pray, because it's only by the grace of God that you get there.

No one looks at your hands to see how much they shake when you are interviewed to be a surgeon. The physical skills required are no greater than for writing cursive script. If an operation requires so much skill only a few surgeons can do it, you modify the operation to make it simpler.

The best surgeon, like best general, is he who makes the fewest mistakes.

I think I'm a good actor, but to replicate tens of thousands of man hours in surgery is really hard.

One might as well try to perform brain surgery with a sledgehammer.

Heart surgeons do not have the world's smallest egos: when you ask them to name the world's three leading practitioners, they never can remember the names of the other two.

The medical operations are so challenging because they're so technical, as well. I assumed before we started that we would do the classic thing, when it comes to the operations, that we would do all of these inserts with real doctors.

I'm a good neurosugeon. That's not a boast but a way of acknowledging the innate ability God has given to me. Beginning with determination and using my gifted hands, I went on for training and sharpening for my skills.

You don't want your neurosurgeon to have doubts about the meaning of it all while he or she is operating on your brain.

Supposing you've got an acute appendicitis. You've got to be operated on tonight. Would you like to have a surgeon who's read some books of anatomy and knows how to do that operation - or would you prefer to have a surgeon who refused to read all books about anatomy and relied on his own instinct?

If you're good with a knife, you don't need your eyes.

This isn't brain surgery; it's just television.

'Why do you think it is...', I asked Dr. Cook ... 'that brain surgery, above all else-even rocket science-gets singled out as the most challenging of human feats, the one demanding the utmost of human intelligence?' [Dr. Cook answered,] 'No margin for error.'

Experience stands on its own dunghill in medicine, and reason yields it place. Medicine has always professed experience to be the touchstone of its operations.

And if doctor says that you don't have IBS with constipation, you might want to get a second opinion, because I had doctors that were telling me... of course, a lot of this has to do with science - progressing.

There is a great difference between a good physician and a bad one; yet very little between a good one and none at all.

The physician himself, if sick, actually calls in another physician, knowing that he cannot reason correctly if required to judge his own condition while suffering.

I was not at all worried about finding my doctor boring; I expected from him, thanks to an art of which the laws escaped me, that he pronounce concerning my health an indisputable oracle by consulting my entrails.

You can't really accurately diagnose someone, I think. Or I've been told that.

[Being a good comedian] is a skill, but it's also a weird thing that only certain people can do. I always equate it to surgeons and how they can just cut people open and operate. Certain people are just wired differently, and I feel like comics are the same way.