We have the sense that medical students come to medicine with a great capacity to understand the suffering of patients. And then by the end of the third year they completely lose that ability, partly because we teach them the specialized language of medicine.

The crookedness of the serpent is still straight enough to slide through the snake hole.

There is a point when grief exceeds the human capacity to emote, and as a result one is strangely composed-

I joke, but I only half joke, that if you come to one of our hospitals missing a limb, no one will believe you till they get a CAT scan, MRI, or orthopedic consult.

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 specialised language, can ironically make one lose sight of the patient one came to serve; empathy can be replaced by cynicism.

I love to read poetry but I haven't written anything that I'm willing to show anybody.

I'm a great believer in geography being destiny.