Atul Gawande Quotes

In the name of Hypocrites, doctors have invented the most exquisite form of torture ever known to man: survival.

The very first requirement in a hospital is that it should do the sick no harm.

Good physicians are rarely dispassionate. They agonize and self-doubt over patients.

Does anyone really go into nursing intending to be apathetic, cold and removed from suffering? I find that very difficult to believe.

Social reform is the desperate decision to remove corns from a person suffering from cancer.

Doctors have been exposed-you always will be exposed-to the attacks of those persons who consider their own undisciplined emotions more important than the world's most bitter agonies-the people who would limit and cripple and hamper research because they fear research may be accompanied by a little pain and suffering.

We are guests in our patients' lives.

I believe often that death is good medical treatment because it can achieve what all the medical advances and technology cannot achieve today, and that is stop the suffering of the patient.

There are those of us who believe that under certain conditions the cruelest thing you can do to people you love is to force them to live. There are those of us who define living not by whether the heart beats and the lungs lift but whether the spirit is there, whether the music box plays.

A foolish physician he is, and a most unfaithful friend, that will let a sick man die for fear of troubling him; and cruel wretches are we to our friends, that will rather suffer them to go quietly to hell, then we will anger them, or hazard our reputation with them.

Labor came to humanity with the fall from grace and was at best a penitential sacrifice enabling purity through humiliation. Laborwas toil, distress, trouble, fatigue--an exertion both painful and compulsory. Labor was our animal condition, struggling to survive in dirt and darkness.

So often our sisters comfort others when their own needs are greater than those being comforted. That quality is like the generosity of Jesus on the cross. Empathy during agony is a portion of divinity!

Care more for the individual patient than for the special features of the disease. . . . Put yourself in his place . . . The kindly word, the cheerful greeting, the sympathetic look - these the patient understands.

I would like to maximize the level of human choice in the medical field...The choice of a treatment in many ways is like the exercise of religion.

You shouldn't reward me for endangering your life, you know. Think of the precedent you're setting.

Real love will take you far beyond yourself;and therefore real love will devastate you.

We live in this world, not another one that we'd prefer, and sometimes it's necessary to follow painful paths if we hope to provide at least a little help for suffering people.

To some, the image of a pale body glimmering on a dark night whispers of defeat. What good is a God who does not control his Son's suffering? But another sound can be heard: the shout of a God crying out to human beings, "I LOVE YOU." Love was compressed for all history in that lonely figure on the cross, who said that he could call down angels at any moment on a rescue mission, but chose not to - because of us. At Calvary, God accepted his own unbreakable terms of justice. Any discussion of how pain and suffering fit into God's scheme ultimately leads back to the cross.

Vague promises of savings from cutting waste, enhancing prevention and wellness, installing electronic medical records and improving quality are merely ‘lipstick’ cost control, more for show and public relations than for true change... Savings will require changing how doctors think about their patients: Doctors take the Hippocratic Oath too seriously, “as an imperative to do everything for the patient regardless of the cost or effects on others.

The depersonalizati on of diagnosis and therapy has changed malpractice from an ethical into a technical problem.

There is only one cardinal rule: One must always listen to the patient.

Why should anyone - the state, the medical profession, or anyone else - presume to tell someone else how much suffering they must endure as their life is ending?

Tai Shimano visited Shunryu Suzuki. "How are you feeling these days?" Suzuki replied, "They have a new name for me: Cancer!"

The physician, to the extent he is a physician, considers only the good of the patient in what he prescribes, and his own not at all

All these mountains of Irish dead, all these corpses mangled beyond recognition, all these arms, legs, eyes, ears, fingers, toes, hands, all these shivering putrefying bodies and portions of bodies once warm living and tender parts of Irish men and youths - all these horrors in Flanders or the Gallipoli Peninsula, are all items in the price Ireland pays for being part of the British Empire.