A. J. Jacobs Quotes

To study the phenomena of disease without books is to sail an uncharted sea, while to study books without patients is not to go to sea at all.

The art of medicine was to be properly learned only from its practice and its exercise.

Medical school education and post graduate education emphasize thoroughness.

The doctor has been taught to be interested not in health but in disease. What the public is taught is that health is the cure for disease.

He who studies medicine without books sails an uncharted sea, but he who studies medicine without patients does not go to sea at all.

I saw my friends in medical school seeming to be more engaged with the real world. That provoked a sort of jealousy, and I decided to go to medical school after all.

From the very commencement the student should set out to witness the progress and effects of sickness and ought to persevere in the daily observation of disease during the whole period of his studies.

I studied in a medical college and qualified myself as a medical graduate.

Students undergo a conversion in the third year of medical school - not pre-clinical to clinical, but pre-cynical to cynical.

I completed medical school at Loma Linda University School of Medicine in 1984.

In Kenya, e-learning has taught 12,000 nurses how to treat major diseases such as HIV and malaria, compared to the 100 nurses a year that can be taught in a classroom.

Like countless first-year medical students, immersed in the symptoms of one disease after another, I am alert to the tingles and pangs, the throbs and quivers of my mortal body, each one of which is potentially a sign of the end.

Medical school had been a time for imaginary diseases and Martin had contracted almost all of them.

While in medical school, I was drafted into the U.S. Army with the other medical students as part of the wartime training program, and naturalized American citizen in 1943. I greatly enjoyed my medical studies, which at the Medical College of Virginia were very clinically oriented.

Was this an old disease, and, if so, which one? If it was new, what did that say about the state of medical knowledge? And in any case, how could physicians make sense of it?

Finish last in your league and they call you idiot. Finish last in medical school and they call you doctor.

When I went to medical school, the term 'digital' applied only to rectal exams.

In an ideal world, the amount of money we spend on medical research to prevent or cure a disease would be proportional to its seriousness and the number of people who suffer from it.

In medical school, it's quite possible to get taught that you can diagnose everybody and treat everything. But then you get out in the real world and find that for most patients walking through your door, you have no idea what's causing their symptoms.

I think what medical training does is it gives you the language, the tools to look up facts. I think medical training gives you a sense of how to approach a problem, how to look at symptoms and go down the list of what it might be.

Moreover, health center services save money and lives by treating diseases before they become chronic conditions, require hospital care or require a trip to the emergency room.

What we need in medical schools is not to teach empathy, as much as to preserve it - the process of learning huge volumes of information about disease, of learning a specialized language, can ironically make one lose sight of the patient one came to serve; empathy can be replaced by cynicism.

The downside to becoming a doctor, I think, is it's a very long process; four years of medical school, three years of internship, two years of residency, umpteen years of specialization, and then finally you get to be what you have trained almost all your life for.

All of the details that most of us memorize in medical school - you don't have to learn those things. They're going to be in your computer.

I never had a conscious fear of death, but I did have a conscious fear of sickness. By the time I completed medical school, that fear was gone.