We have had a rewarding relationship, the belly and I.
Not death but disease is the real enemy; disease, the malign force that requires confrontation. Death is the surcease that comes when the exhausting battle has been lost.
The writings and the recommendations of the earliest medical scientists and the new breed of clinicians between the mid-fifteenth and early seventeenth centuries were based on the supposition that suf...
Though everyone may yearn for a tranquil death, the basic instinct to stay alive is a far more powerful force
Moths and flames, mankind and death--there is little difference.
Every triumph over some major pathology, no matter how ringing the victory, is only a reprieve from the inevitable end.
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...
Every hope of successive generations of scholars that order might be constructed from the chaotic mess of medical nomenclature has been frustrated. Even diseases recognized in the same historical peri...
We are not well served by being lulled into unjustified expectations.
Beyond the curiosity and the problem-solving challenge fundamental to good research, I believe that the fantasy of controlling nature lies at the very basis of modern science.
By the time of my ninth birthday, I had become a bit of a socialist, as I am said by conservative colleagues to be to this day. I went on within the next few years to volunteer as an envelope stuffer...
The patient dies alone among strangers: well-meaning, empathetic, determinedly committed to sustaining his life - but strangers nonetheless.
Long regarded as central to the contemporary understanding of medical ethics are four principles that must be satisfied in order to fulfill the requirements of moral decision-making. These principles...
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.
It is also the recognition that the real event taking place at the end of our life is our death, not the attempts to prevent it.
My mother died of colon cancer one week after my eleventh birthday, and that fact has shaped my life. All that I have become and much that I have not become, I trace directly or indirectly to her deat...
The lesson is never learned—there will always be those who persist in seeking the Fountain of Youth, or at least delaying what is irrevocably ordained.
When we mourn, it should be the loss of love that makes us grieve, not the guilt that we did something wrong.
The virus has robbed them of their youth, and it is about to rob them of the rest of their
Far from being irreplaceable, we should be replaced. Fantasies of staying the hand of mortality are incompatible with the best interests of our species and the continuity of humankind's progress. More...
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