Medical Examiner Quotes

Screw up my life?" He stared at me for a second and then said, deadpan, "I'm a five-foot-three, thirty-seven-year-old, single, Jewish medical examiner who needs to pick up his lederhosen from the dry cleaners so that he can play in a one-man polka band at Oktoberfest tomorrow." He pushed up his glasses with his forefinger, folded his arms, and said, "Do your worst. ~ Jim Butcher

The girl who climbed up the water tower. We would have counted her an accident until the medical examiner found breaks and fractures from her hips to her heels. "You fall head first," he said. "Feet first's a jump. ~ Thomas Lynch

I think of myself as a fairly logical, scientific and somewhat reserved person. Maura Isles, the Boston medical examiner who appears in five of my books, is me. Almost everything I use in describing her, from her taste in wine to her biographical data, is taken from my own family. Except I don't have a serial killer as a mother! ~ Tess Gerritsen

I was so engrossed by the idea that it took me a moment to register that the drivers behind were laying on their horns and I had a green. I hit the gas, rummaged one-handed through the files Cumali had given me, found a note to the medical examiner with her mobile number attached to it, and pulled out my cell phone. I was halfway through dialing when I realized that a woman with a six-year-old child might not appreciate being woken, and, anyway, what was she going to do that late at night? ~ Terry Hayes

There are a few who envy me. They want to know what they have to do to get my job, to be who I am. "It's only death, how hard can it be?" Here, I silently reply, take it all. Every festering remnant of the people no one cared about in life, much less in death; all the broken children who will never know that I had grieved for them. Take it all. Just leave me my car keys so I can go home permanently. Someone else can listen to the bullshit Death loves to spew. He never shuts up. ~ Joseph Scott Morgan

After the trial, I watched as another female pathologist collected maggots from a spinal column found in the desert. There was a decomposed head, too, and before leaving work she planned to simmer it and study the exposed cranium for contusions. I was asked to pass this information along to the chief medical examiner, and, looking back, I perhaps should have chosen my words more carefully. 'Fire up the kettle,' I told him. 'Ol'-fashioned skull boil at five p.m. ~ David Sedaris

What it needed was a subtle but significant change in presentation. The students needed to know how to fit the tetanus stuff into their lives; the addition of the map and the times when the shots were available shifted the booklet from an abstract lesson in medical risk - a lesson no different from the countless other academic lessons they had received over their academic career - to a practical and personal piece of medical advice. And ~ Anonymous

I have even taught classes on writing about sex, and I've looked closely at different writers' sex scenes. On the level of craft I've given it a lot of thought. The pitfalls are simple: It can sound clinical or medical, which isn't right, or pornographic, because the characters disappear. ~ K.M. Soehnlein

I guess if Dunc and I got married.....we would live in an apartment first. With regular jobs. Then. Then we would get good jobs.
And.
And he would go to medical school.
Um.
And I would take time off to have one.
Perfect. Baby. ~ Mariko Tamaki

With tens of thousands of patients dying every year from preventable medical errors, it is imperative that we embrace available technologies and drastically improve the way medical records are handled and processed. ~ Jon Porter

If the virus had arrived in a different sort of big city - more loosely governed, full of poor people, lacking first-rate medical institutions - it might have escaped containment and burned through a ~ David Quammen

Enclosed by a sand berm four miles around and 160 feet high, the Baghdad Nuclear Research Facility entombs what remains of reactors bombed by Israel in 1981 and the United States in 1991. It has stored industrial and medical wastes, along with spent reactor fuel. ~ Barton Gellman

The field of U.S. cancer care is organized around a medical monopoly that ensures a continuous flow of money to the pharmaceutical companies, medical technology firms, research institutes, and government agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and quasi-public organizations such as the American Cancer Society (ACS). ~ John Diamond

I never had plastic surgery. I had a nose procedure done because I had to. I had no cartilage in my nose; I have a piece of cartilage from my ear put into my nose. I had a medical procedure done. I have no plastic in my nose. ~ Tamar Braxton

I think every doctor should know the shocking state of affairs ... We discovered they (the FDA) failed to effectively regulate the large manufacturers and powerful interests while recklessly persecuting the small manufacturers ... (The FDA is) harassing (small) manufacturers and doctors ... (and) betrays the public trust. ~ Edward V. Long

The next wave of medical advances will be when we come to recognize the body as an energetic system. ~ Lisa Oz

If the government was going to continue to act as if we didn't exist, if the medical establishment was prone to gridlock over funds, if the drug companies were waiting till the curve got high enough for profit, then we would find our own way. ~ Paul Monette

Nonviolent coercion always brings tension to the surface. This tension, however, must not be seen as destructive. There is a kind of tension that is both healthy and necessary for growth. Society needs nonviolent gadflies to bring its tensions into the open and force its citizens to confront the ugliness of their prejudices and the tragedy of their racism.

It is important for the liberal to see that the oppressed person who agitates for his rights is not the creator of tension....How strange it would be to condemn a physician who, through persistent work and the ingenuity of his medical skills, discovered cancer in a patient. Would anyone be so ignorant as to say he caused the cancer? Through the skills and discipline of direct action we reveal that there is a dangerous cancer of hatred and racism in our society. We did not cause the cancer; we merely exposed it. Only through this kind of exposure will the cancer be cured. ~ Martin Luther King Jr.

Long regarded as central to the contemporary understanding of medical ethics are four principles that must be satisfied in order to fulfill the requirements of moral decision-making. These principles are autonomy, justice, beneficence, and non-maleficence. ~ Sherwin B. Nuland

After you find out all the things that can go wrong, your life becomes less about living and more about waiting. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

President Obama and his radical feminist enforcers have had it in for Catholic medical providers from the get-go. It's about time all people of faith fought back against this unprecedented encroachment on religious liberty. First, they came for the Catholics. Who's next? ~ Michelle Malkin

In all, 86 per cent of the increased life expectancy was due to decreases in infectious diseases. And the bulk of the decline in infectious disease deaths occurred prior to the age of antibiotics. Less than 4 per cent of the total improvement in life expectancy since 1700s can be credited to twentieth-century advances in medical care. ~ Laurie Garrett

Marijuana is the finest anti-nausea medication known to science, and our leaders have lied about this consistently. [Arresting people for] medical marijuana is the most hideous example of government interference in the private lives of individuals. It's an outrage within an outrage within an outrage. ~ Peter McWilliams

Ultimately the judge threw Moore's suit out of court, saying he had no case. Ironically, in his decision, the judge cited the HeLa cell line as a precedent for what happened with the Mo cell line. The fact that no one had sued over the growth or ownership of the HeLa cell line, he said, illustrated that patients didn't mind when doctors took their cells and turned them into commercial products. The judge believed Moore was unusual in his objections. But in fact, he was simply the first to realize there was something potentially objectionable going on. ~ Rebecca Skloot

In many respects, people on the outside suffered more than those of us in jail. In prison, we ate three times a day, we had clothing, we had free medical services, and we could sleep for 12 hours. ~ Nelson Mandela

There are three subjects on which the knowledge of the medical profession in general is woefully weak; they are manners, morals, and medicine. ~ Gerald F. Lieberman

It's one thing for a rape victim to speak up, or a woman with a wanted pregnancy that has turned into a medical catastrophe. But why can't a woman just say, This wasn't the right time for me? Or two children (or one, or none) are enough? Why must the woman apologize for not having a baby just because she happened to get pregnant? It's as if we think motherhood is the default setting for a woman's life from first period to menopause, ~ Katha Pollitt

With his revelation, ... I shattered into a million shards. I felt each piece as it splintered and separated from the whole like a glass I had broken the day before. Debris flew everywhere. It left me without any option but to pick each broken piece up, analyze it, and find out where it belonged. I had to find out where I belonged.
Allison La Crosse - Warriors of the Cross ~ T.R. Graves

A pregnant woman facing the most dire circumstances must be able to count on her doctor to do what is medically necessary to protect her from serious physical harm. ~ Barbara Mikulski

They said 'specialist children's wards,'
But they meant children-killing centers.
They said 'final medical assistance'
But they meant murder. ~ Ann Clare LeZotte

If your Doctor cannot prove they are the Creator, what right do they have to give you an expiration date? None fight for your right to live. Been on hospice almost 16 years now. No 'man' has any right to say you have less then 6 months to live, no matter what the pages on the wall say. Fight its your right. ~ Debee Sue

I began to come into close contact with poverty, with hunger, with disease, with the inability to cure a child because of a lack of resources… And I began to see there was something that, at that time, seemed to me almost as important as being a famous researcher or making some substantial contribution to medical science, and this was helping those people. ~ Ernesto Che Guevara

The morbid thought had a power of its own that he could not control. It was not foreseen in his philosophical brand of psychology, where everything flowed neatly from consciousness and sense-perception. The professor admitted that his case was pathological, but there his thinking stopped, because it had arrived at the sacrosanct border-line between the philosophical and the medical faculty. ~ C. G. Jung

Before journalism, I had worked doing medical aid work in conflict zones. Then, as a journalist, I had written about hospitals in war zones. ~ Sheri Fink

I basically believe the medical insurance industry should be nonprofit, not profit-making. There is no way a health reform plan will work when it is implemented by an industry that seeks to return money to shareholders instead of using that money to provide health care. ~ Dianne Feinstein

Please don't humiliate me by killing yourself before we can save your life. ~ Kristin Hannah

Money is the "god of this world," and it empowers millions of people to enjoy life by living on substitutes. With money, they can buy entertainment, but they can't buy joy. They can go to the drugstore and buy sleep, but they can't buy peace. Their money will attract lots of acquaintances but very few real friends. Wealth gains them admiration and envy but not love. It buys the best in medical services, but it can't buy health. ~ Warren W. Wiersbe