I'm now convinced that I'm a doctor. I mean, if someone says they have a pain, I'm like, 'Well, that's your spleen.'
Practicing medicine is not only my vocation, it gives me an opportunity to continue to be in direct contact with people, to see them and hear their needs.
I have seen good nurses and bad nurses. They existed along a continuum: from hard-working, kind and competent people, to office-hugging, bone-idle types, to apathetic, disengaged automatons.
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.
I observe the physician with the same diligence as the disease.
The art of medicine was to be properly learned only from its practice and its exercise.
There are skills you pick up on in a clinical environment in terms of how to ask questions, what to look for, how to listen that serve one well when trying to write.
By keeping my hand in that, it's the way I keep learning. The main way you learn in medicine is by practicing and working with patients.
I'm an internist by training.
There is a great difference between a good physician and a bad one; yet very little between a good one and none at all.
Certainly when I got to medical school, I had role models of the kind of physicians I wanted to be. I had an uncle who, looking back, was probably not the most-educated physician around, but he carried it off so well.
Medical judgment can be taught - laboriously, in long periods of training - but it cannot be neatly handed over as the occasion demands it. It is the irreplaceable and untransferable contribution that the healer makes to the suffering individual who would be healed.
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 flatter myself to even imagine I could have had a medical practice. There's no way. I'm not scientific or disciplined enough, lots of things.
The art of medicine cannot be inherited, nor can it be copied from books
Very few [doctors] are men of science in any very serious sense; they're men of technique.
Panic plays no part in the training of a nurse.
Nursing is an art: and if it is to be made an art, it requires an exclusive devotion as hard a preparation as any painter's or sculptor's work.
One of the first things we teach medical students is to listen to the patient by taking a careful medical history. Ninety percent of the time, you can arrive at an uncannily accurate diagnosis by paying close attention, using physical examination and sophisticated lab test to confirm your hunch (and to increase the bill to the insurance company).
Medicine is not only a science; it is also an art. It does not consist of compounding pills and plasters; it deals with the very processes of life, which must be understood before they may be guided.
The less experienced a doctor is, the higher are his notions of professional dignity . . .
I am a fantastic nurse. I discovered this about myself, and I'm really fantastic about diagnosing things.
Patients know in a heartbeat if they're getting a clumsy exam.
I have no medical knowledge whatsoever so playing a surgeon on 'Holby' has been a real eye opener!
Anytime my work can coax bodily fluids out of someone, I'm happy.
