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.

Sometimes we can offer a cure, sometimes only a salve, sometimes not even that. But whatever we can offer, our interventions, and the risks and sacrifices they entail, are justified only if they serve the larger aims of a person's life. When we forget that, the suffering we inflict can be barbaric. When we remember it the good we do can be breathtaking.

You can't make a recipe for something as complicated as surgery. Instead, you can make a recipe for how to have a team that's prepared for the unexpected.

We recruit for attitude and train for skill.

In many ways, the effort to study philosophy was my rebellion away from medicine. I'm the son of two Indian immigrant physicians, so the natural path for me would have been to become a doctor. I ended up doing the master's degree at Oxford in politics, philosophy, and economics while already having a seat in medical school. I was keeping that as my escape hatch. But my hope was that I might become a philosopher or something else entirely.

You know, 97 percent of the time, if you come into a hospital, everything goes well. But three percent of the time, we have major complications.

Man is fallible, but maybe men are less so.