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.

What treatment in an emergency is administered by ear?

We are all fixing what is broken. It is the task of a lifetime. We'll leave much unfinished for the next generation.

Literature is a beautiful way of keeping the imagination alive, of visiting worlds you would never have time to in your day-to-day life. It keeps you abreast of a wider spectrum of human activities.

The world turns on our every action, and our every omission, whether we know it or not.

A rich man's faults are covered with money, but a surgeon's faults are covered with earth.

Geography is destiny.