Surgeon Quotes

You [men] are our protectors, is not true; for if you were, who would there be to protect us from?

Some people think plant-based diet, whole foods diet is extreme.

Half a million people a year will have their chests opened up and a vein taken from their leg and sewn onto their coronary artery. Some people would call that extreme.

Let the generations know that women in uniform also guaranteed their freedom.

Better is possible. It does not take genius. It takes diligence. It takes moral clarity. It takes ingenuity. And above all, it takes a willingness to try.

The only weapon with which the unconscious patient can immediately retaliate upon the incompetent surgeon is hemorrhage.

Often a healing takes place in ourselves as we pray for the healing of others.

Real success requires respect for and faithfulness to the highest human values-honesty, integrity, self-discipline, dignity, compassion, humility, courage, personal responsibility, courtesy, and human service.

The natural history of science is the study of the unknown.

If you fear it you're not going to study it and you're not going to make any progress.

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.

I fired the ball for the purpose of giving those dudes to understand upon what ground I stood, believing that those of this class who believe that there are no women capable of taking care of themselves when young, would inform their friends that they might be in danger of their lives if they approached me.

Whatever you give, if you give it freely and without conditions it'll come back to you two fold.

If it is right to be legally married, it is right to be legally divorced .

.. To be deprived of a Divorce is like being shut up in prison because someone attempted to kill you. It is just as honorable to get out of matrimonial trouble legally, as to be freed from any other wrong.

I have little tolerance for incompetence, sloppy thinking, and laziness.

It was not noisy prejudice that caused the work of Mendel to lie dead for thirty years, but the sheer inability of contemporary opinion to distinguish between a new idea and nonsense.

Cancer is really a slew of rare diseases.

Lung cancer has 700 sub-types, breast cancer has 30,000 mutations which means that every cancer in its own right is a rare disease. Sharing data globally in this context is really important from a life-threatening perspective.

How good it is to be well-fed, healthy, and kind all at the same time.

We always hope for the easy fix: the one simple change that will erase a problem in a stroke. But few things in life work this way. Instead, success requires making a hundred small steps go right - one after the other, no slipups, no goofs, everyone pitching in.

Medical scientists are nice people, but you should not let them treat you.

The truly scientific mind is altogether unafraid of the new, and while having no mercy for ideas which have served their turn or shown their uselessness, it will not grudge to any unfamiliar conception its moment of full and friendly attention, hoping to expand rather than to minimize what small core of usefulness it may happen to contain.

You need the courage to seem foolish and to fail.

Having the USDA design your food pyramid is like having Al Capone do your taxes.

An inquiring, analytical mind; an unquenchable thirst for new knowledge; and a heartfelt compassion for the ailing - these are prominent traits among the committed clinicians who have preserved the passion for medicine.

Good information is the best medicine.

Heart disease is a foodborne illness.

I'll remind you one more time, I've treated a lot of vegans for heart disease.

A woman reasons by telegraph, and his [a man's] stage-coach reasoning cannot keep pace with hers.

Every surgeon carries within himself a small cemetery, where from time to time he goes to pray.

The mind likes a strange idea as little as the body likes a strange protein and resists it with similar energy. It would not perhaps be too fanciful to say that a new idea is the most quickly acting antigen known to science.

We've created a multitrillion-dollar edifice for dispensing the medical equivalent of lottery tickets - and have only the rudiments of a system to prepare patients for the near certainty that those tickets will not win. Hope is not a plan, but hope is our plan.

Checklists turn out...to be among the basic tools of the quality and productivity revolution in aviation, engineering, construction - in virtually every field combining high risk and complexity. Checklists seem lowly and simplistic, but they help fill in for the gaps in our brains and between our brains.

A failure often does not have to be a failure at all.

However, you have to be ready for it-will you admit when things go wrong? Will you take steps to set them right?-because the difference between triumph and defeat, you'll find, isn't about willingness to take risks. It's about mastery of rescue.

As a physician, I am embarrassed by my profession's lack of interest in healthier lifestyles. We need to change the way we approach chronic disease.

A successful surgeon should be a man who, when asked to name the three best surgeons in the world, would have difficulty deciding on the other two.

Collectively the media; the meat, oil, and dairy industries; most prominent chefs and cookbook authors; and our own government are not presenting accurate advice about the healthiest way to eat.

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.

God often visits us, but most of the time we are not at home.

Creative ideas are often attacked because people oppose change or do not understand new concepts.

When orators and auditors have the same prejudices, those prejudices run a great risk of being made to stand for incontestable truths.

This is the reality of intensive care: at any point, we are as apt to harm as we are to heal.

The next big frontier in medicine is Energy Medicine.

I think human beings have an innate desire to help each other.

And whether you're in medicine or anything else, if you see someone that you can help...you get a gratification from doing it. In fact, I think that is perhaps the most important, you might say, fabric that holds the society together.

You don't do anybody any favours by being less than you are.

We call that person who has lost his father, an orphan;

and a widower that man who has lost his wife. But that man who has known the immense unhappiness of losing a friend, by what name do we call him? Here every language is silent and holds its peace in impotence.

The dignity to be sought in death is the appreciation by others of what one has been in life,... that proceeds from a life well lived and from the acceptance of one's own death as a necessary process of nature.... It is also the recognition that the real event taking place at the end of our life is our death, not the attempts to prevent it.

Australia has got some of the best sports people in the world, but we've also got some of the best scientists and innovators too, and that needs to be celebrated more.

A smart mother makes often a better diagnosis than a poor doctor.

I still take failure very seriously, but I've found that the only way I could overcome the feeling is to keep on working, and trying to benefit from failures or disappointments. There are always some lessons to be learned. So I keep on working.

No one teaches you how to think about money in medical school or residency.

Yet, from the moment you start practicing, you must think about it. You must consider what is covered for a patient and what is not.

The Wright brothers' first flight was shorter than a Boeing 747's wing span.

We've just begun with heart transplants.

Solitude vivifies, isolation kills.