If we took away the ability to put defibrillators in people in their last years, people would be shouting in the streets.

After readinf some essay on the nature of human fallibility, I was very aware that we are the recipients of a huge amount of discovery over the last century. Medicine exemplifies this. And that has transitioned us from a world in which people's lives were mostly governed by ignorance to one that's constrained by ineptitude. A century ago, we didn't know, for instance, what diseases afflicted us, what their nature really was, or what to do about them. And that has changed.

I chose surgery because I thought that perhaps this would make me more like the kind of person I wanted to be.

At times, in medicine, you feel you are inside a colossal and impossibly complex machine whose gears will turn for you only according to their own arbitrary rhythm. The notion that human caring, the effort to do better for people, might make a difference can seem hopelessly naive. But it isn't.

There are times when you have sharp elbows, and people are trying to muscle you out of certain meetings - because then people could leak to the press that you had a role in certain decisions. I, at twenty-six, was very impatient and didn't know how to keep my powder dry. I was running a team of seventy-five people when I had never been a boss. I was the worst boss ever.

Our reluctance to honestly examine the experience of aging and dying has increased the harm we inflict on people and denied them the basic comforts they most need.

When we lived in a society where we had large families that lived together, especially in agricultural societies like my grandfather and father grew up in, the result is you always had family around to take care of you.