Surgery is the red flower that blooms among the leaves and thorns that are the rest of medicine.

Thus is the fruit of the Earth taken, its flesh torn. Thus is it given over standing, toward rot. It is the principle of corruption, the death of what is, the birth of what is to be. You are wine.

Surgery is the red flower that blooms among the leaves and thorns that are the rest of medicine.

You cannot separate passion from pathology any more than you can separate a person's spirit from his body.

Each is like a river that leaves behind its name and shape, the whole course of its path , to vanish into the vast sea of God.

The liver, that great maroon snail: No wave of emotion sweeps it. Neither music nor mathematics gives it pause in its appointed tasks.

You do not die all at once. Some tissues live on for minutes, even hours, giving still their little cellular shrieks, molecular echoes of the agony of the whole corpus.