According to Shiva, life is in the end about fixing holes. Shiva didn't speak in metaphors. fixing holes is precisely what he did. Still, it's an apt metaphor for our profession. But there's another kind of hole, and that is the wound that divides family. Sometimes this wound occurs at the moment of birth, sometimes it happens later. We are all fixing what is broken. It is the task of a lifetime. We'll leave much unfinished for the next generation.

To be around someone whose self-confidence is more than what our first glance led us to expect is seductive.

Students undergo a conversion in the third year of medical school - not pre-clinical to clinical, but pre-cynical to cynical.

By visiting patients in their home, by helping them come to terms with their illness, I could heal when I could not cure.

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.

She felt the familiar calmness of an emergency, but she understood the falseness of that feeling, now that it was her life at stake.

He was teaching me how to die, just as he'd taught me how to live.