Medical Students Quotes

In 1970, Dean Robert Ebert offered me the Chair of Pathology at Harvard Medical School. I moved to Harvard because I missed the university environment and, more particularly, the stimulating interaction with the eager, enthusiastic, and unprejudiced young minds of the students and fellows. ~ Baruj Benacerraf

Babies used to make me nervous, but these squirmy things are awesome once you've read the manual. ~ David Z. Hirsch

A doctor should be a clown at heart, a scientist at brain and a mother at conscience. ~ Abhijit Naskar

Montpellier produced nearly 40 percent of all physicians in France, but the university had a troubled reputation as a party school where medical students were just as likely to drink and cavort with prostitutes as they were to learn the intricacies of the Hippocratic corpus. ~ Holly Tucker

Some Iranian doctors from Europe and America go to Iran and operate for free or teach medical students there. The other day, I met a gentlemen who is helping to protect wildlife in Iran. It's good that many of them don't forget about their country. It's important. ~ Farah Diba

A schoolchild should be taught grammar
for the same reason that a medical student should study anatomy. Having learned about the exciting mysteries of an English sentence, the child can then go forth and speak and write any damn way he pleases. ~ E.B. White

Many medical students, like most American patients, confuse science and technology. They think that what it means to be a scientific doctor is to bring to bear the maximum amount of technology on any given patient. And this makes them dangerous. ~ Alice Dreger

Out similar characteristics in everyone. For example, law students were undisciplined and competitive, medical students strict and lacking a sense of humor, philosophy ~ Donato Carrisi

As we medical students saw it, the failure of those around Ivan Ilyich to offer comfort or to acknowledge what is happening to him was a failure of character and culture. ~ Atul Gawande

We have the sense that medical students come to medicine with a great capacity to understand the suffering of patients. And then by the end of the third year they completely lose that ability, partly because we teach them the specialized language of medicine. ~ Abraham Verghese

Richard had long ago made it clear that he viewed medical students as nothing more than an annoyance. Part canker, part pustule, we functioned – were he ever so generous to use that word – as vestigial organs, adding to the team like supernumerary nipples. ~ David Z. Hirsch

By Mamun's time medical schools were extremely active in Baghdad. The first free public hospital was opened in Baghdad during the Caliphate of Haroon-ar-Rashid. As the system developed, physicians and surgeons were appointed who gave lectures to medical students and issued diplomas to those who were considered qualified to practice. The first hospital in Egypt was opened in 872 AD and thereafter public hospitals sprang up all over the empire from Spain and the Maghrib to Persia. ~ John Bagot Glubb

For the most part, people use "empathy" to mean everything good. For instance, many medical schools have courses in empathy. But if you look at what they mean, they just want medical students to be nicer to their patients, to listen to them, to respect them, to understand them. What's not to like? If they were really teaching empathy, then I'd say there is a world of problems there. ~ Paul Bloom

Both David and Marcus, I came to realize, though they seemed happy enough, and looked forward to being doctors, had a certain sadness, a sense of loss and renunciation, about other interests they had given up.... Both became medical students, in part, to defer their call-up. But with this, I think, they deferred their other aspirations, a deferment that seemed permanent and irreversible by the time they returned to London. ~ Oliver Sacks

This was what he taught at the Collège de France. And in the entire neighborhood, in all the nearby Faculties, in the literature, law, history and philosophy courses, at the Institute and at the Palais de Justice, in the buses, the métros, in all the government offices, sensible men, normal men, active men, worthy, wholesome, strong men, triumphed.
Avoiding the shops filled with pretty things, the women trotting briskly along, the café waiters, the medical students, the traffic policemen, the clerks from notary offices, Rimbaud or Proust, having been torn from life, cast out from life and deprived of support, were probably wandering aimlessly through the streets, or dozing away, their heads resting on their chests, in some dusty public square. ~ Nathalie Sarraute

There is no painkiller as effective as love, no anti-depressant as soothing as cheer, no defibrillator as powerful as wisdom. ~ Abhijit Naskar

The establishment of medical studies in the university (as opposed to some other possible institutional home) created a linkage between medicine and other branches of knowledge that profoundly shaped the development of medicine. Specifically, a degree in the faculty of arts came to be a typical (if not quite universal) prerequisite for medical studies; and this meant that medical students came equipped with the logical and philosophical tools that would transform medicine (for better or for worse) into a rigorous, scholastic enterprise. ~ David C. Lindberg

Everything teeters between pathos and bathos: here you are, violating society's most fundamental taboos and yet formaldehyde is a powerful appetite stimulant, so you also crave a burrito. ~ Paul Kalanithi

Students undergo a conversion in the third year of medical school - not pre-clinical to clinical, but pre-cynical to cynical. ~ Abraham Verghese

The world doesn't need more smart doctors, it needs more warm and wise doctors. Be the wisdom yourself - be the warmth yourself, and be the doctor that the doctors have forgotten to be, for it is time to save medicine, to save humanity. ~ Abhijit Naskar

One of the first things we teach medical students is to listen to the patient by taking a careful medical history. Ninety percent of the time, you can arrive at an uncannily accurate diagnosis by paying close attention, using physical examination and sophisticated lab test to confirm your hunch (and to increase the bill to the insurance company). ~ V.S. Ramachandran

Percent of medical students take no course in geriatrics, ~ Atul Gawande

I remember going to the British Museum one day to read up the treatment for some slight ailment of which I had a touch – hay fever, I fancy it was. I got down the book, and read all I came to read; and then, in an unthinking moment, I idly turned the leaves, and began to indolently study diseases, generally. I forget which was the first distemper I plunged into – some fearful, devastating scourge, I know – and, before I had glanced half down the list of "premonitory symptoms," it was borne in upon me that I had fairly got it.

I sat for awhile, frozen with horror; and then, in the listlessness of despair, I again turned over the pages. I came to typhoid fever – read the symptoms – discovered that I had typhoid fever, must have had it for months without knowing it – wondered what else I had got; turned up St. Vitus's Dance – found, as I expected, that I had that too, – began to get interested in my case, and determined to sift it to the bottom, and so started alphabetically – read up ague, and learnt that I was sickening for it, and that the acute stage would commence in about another fortnight. Bright's disease, I was relieved to find, I had only in a modified form, and, so far as that was concerned, I might live for years. Cholera I had, with severe complications; and diphtheria I seemed to have been born with. I plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six letters, and the only malady I could conclude I had not got was housemaid's knee.

...

Jerome K. Jerome

A 2016 study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America suggested that health care providers may underestimate black patients' pain in part due to a belief that they simply don't actually feel as much pain - a myth that dates all the way back to the days of slavery. For centuries, the claim that black people were biologically different from whites was 'championed by scientists, physicians, and slave owners alike to justify slavery and the inhumane treatment of black men and women in medical research,' the authors wrote. Black people were thought to have 'thicker skulls, less sensitive nervous systems,' and a super-human ability to 'tolerate surgical operations with little, if any, pain at all.'

In the first phase of the study, over two hundred white medical students and residents were asked whether a series of statements about differences between black and white patients were true or false. Some of the statements were true, while others - for example, 'blacks' skin is thicker than whites' and 'blacks' nerve endings are less sensitive than whites' - were false. They found that a full half of the respondents thought that one or more the false statements - many of which were 'fantastical in nature' - were possibly, probably, or definitely true. Also, notably, many of them didn't agree with the statements that were actually true; only half of the residents knew that white patients are less likely to have heart disease t ~ Maya Dusenbery

Like countless first-year medical students, immersed in the symptoms of one disease after another, I am alert to the tingles and pangs, the throbs and quivers of my mortal body, each one of which is potentially a sign of the end. ~ Siri Hustvedt

The midpoint in medicine between excessive emotional involvement with patients and a complete lack of empathy is not a simple one to locate. ~ Christine Montross

I was under the care of a couple of medical students who couldn't diagnose a decapitation. ~ Jeffrey Bernard

There was a golden period that I look back upon with great regret, in which the cheapest of experimental animals were medical students. Graduate students were even better. In the old days, if you offered a graduate student a thiamine-deficient diet, he gladly went on it, for that was the only way he could eat. Science is getting to be more and more difficult. ~ George Wald

A respect for authority is the basis for most medical education. Students may become so used to memorising that they become prey to the illusion that the reason for learning to parrot lectures and textbooks is that they are the 'truth'. ~ Petr Skrabanek

Nancy [Kassebaum] and I worked on a women's health agenda when I first came. Women were not included in the protocols at NIH, the famous study, 'take an aspirin a day, keep the doctor, you know, a heart attack away.' It was done on ten thousand male medical students. ~ Barbara Mikulski

The five branches are immortalized in every medical student's memory as Two Zombies Buggered My Cat (Temporal, Zygomatic, Buccal, Mandibular and Cervical). Remembering ~ Gavin Francis

Wouldn't it be great,as Scott Peck suggests, if all medical students had to undergo the symptoms and feeling of a spectrum of illnesses. From acute infections to terminal cancer - and Kuru, the laughing sickness. Just a month for each exposure, controlled of course, and a good heavy dose of excruciating pain. So they'll know what that feels like. ~ William S. Burroughs

GRAVE, n. A place in which the dead are laid to await the coming of the medical student. ~ Ambrose Bierce

The traditional gross anatomy lab represented a sort of sink-or-swim mentality about dealing with death. To cope with what was being asked of them, medical students had to find ways to desensitize themselves. They quickly learned to objectify cadavers, to think of the dead as structures and tissues, and not a former human being. Humor--at the cadaver's expense--was tolerated, condoned even. ~ Mary Roach

All that man needs for health and healing has been provided by God in nature, the Challenge of science is to find it. ~ Paracelsus

This medical device gives doctors a new option for treating twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome. It can help prolong the mother's pregnancy and improve the odds of survival, with reduced complications, for one or both twins. ~ Daniel Schultz

I went to University of Illinois. Big school. 35,000 students. 800 black ... I was the only black in every class. Hard to be absent. ~ Godfrey

The idea to use backpacks came from my visit to Sichuan after the earthquake in May 2008. During the earthquake many schools collapsed. Thousands of young students lost their lives, and you could see bags and study material everywhere. Then you realize individual life, media, and the lives of the students are serving very different purposes. The lives of the students disappeared within the state propaganda, and very soon everybody will forget everything. ~ Ai Weiwei

Oh, sure," Gansey said, still cold and annoyed. "God forbid young men display their principles with futile but public protests when they could be skipping school and judging other students from the backseat of a motor vehicle."

"Principles? Henry Cheng's principles are all about getting larger font in the school newsletter," Ronan said. He did a vaguely offensive version of Henry's voice: "Serif? Sans serif? More bold, less italics. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

I had an idea for a medical conspiracy thriller. Since it was non-horror, I didn't want the publishers and editors bringing a lot of baggage - my history as a genre writer in the SF and horror fields, for instance - to the novel when they read it. I wanted them to consider the book solely on its own merits. So I called myself Colin Andrews. I was tired of seeing my books at floor level. Not that Herman Wouk and Phyllis Whitney and William Wharton are bad company, but I wanted to be up at eye level for a change, where people with bad backs could get a chance to see my books. ~ F. Paul Wilson

In the U.S.A., technical innovations come out of universities and the research produced by Ph.D. students. We don't have that happening in India. ~ Ram Shriram

They left. Among the many dumb rules of paragraphing foisted on students in composition courses is the one that says that a paragraph may not consist of a single sentence. Wilkerson ends a richly descriptive introductory chapter with a paragraph composed of exactly two syllables. The abrupt ending and the expanse of blankness at the bottom of the page mirror the finality of the decision to move and the uncertainty of the life that lay ahead. Good writing finishes strong. ~ Steven Pinker

We test students right after they read something mostly to ensure that they have in fact read it. From this, many have drawn the erroneous conclusion that the only good that can be extracted from their reading is that which can be displayed on or measured by a test. This is wildly inaccurate. Most of the good your reading and education has done for you is not something you can recall at all. ~ Douglas Wilson

I don't regret not going to college. Students learn up to the age of 21, then stop. I'll always be learning - the things that really matter in life. How to sign on, how to get free food, how to be streetwise. ~ Caitlin Moran

The child intuitively comprehends that although these stories are unreal, they are not untrue ... ~ Bruno Bettelheim

I'm a big fan of regular school and regular education. I just learn better in a classroom where I can talk to other students. I want to go to prom and dances and have that social aspect. ~ Nick Robinson

I always start my class with a coloring assignment using crayons to color three pages from a variety of coloring pages pinned to the wall. Pick 3. Color them densely, trying to get as much of the crayon on the paper as possible. Students find it frustrating because crayons are surprisingly hard to work with, but they usually have some fun doing it. Until...when the finished pages were pinned to the wall, all of the pages were colored just the way I assigned - but all the joy was gone. Something went wrong.

What was it?

This: I told them to color hard in order to do it right. And go straight to using force - thinking I was showing them a short-cut - - this took away the way of coloring they would have found on their own. By telling them just how to do it, I took the playing-around away, the gradual figuring out that brings something alive to this activity, makes it worth-while, and is transferable to other activities.

I realize now the best results came when I gave no instructions except, "spend time on this assignment." That was 3 years ago. Why did it take me so long to figure this out? ~ Lynda Barry

If freedom means anything at all, it is the right to primacy in regard to sexuality, reproduction, medical care and death. ~ Jacob M. Appel

A great deal of the American medical community's resources is geared to addressing the cosmetic needs of both women and men whom fear that by showing the deleterious effects of aging their marital relationship is in jeopardy. The most ethical plastic surgeons decline to perform impetuous work; the less ethical, but often the wealthiest professionals, perform all requested work irrespective of the long-term viability of the services rendered. The plastic surgeon's sales pitch is predictable: everyone can receive the face that he or she can afford. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Hasty learning can lead to mistakes, and magical mistakes tend to be more spectacular than healing mistakes. My father used to use that reasoning to explain why apprentices of magi drink far less than the students of healing."
Veran grinned. "'Healers wake up with a sore head," he used to say; 'magicians wake up with a sore head, our toes burned black and the roof on the floor. ~ Trudi Canavan

Naomi coughed. It was wet, painful sound, but the medical bay didn't seem concerned. The machine had a shitty bedside manner. ~ James S.A. Corey

Good students wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. This is the most important lesson of them all: we must wait for other people, better trained than ourselves, to make the meanings of our lives. The expert makes all the important choices; only I, the teacher, can determine what my kids must study, or rather, only the people who pay me can make those decisions, which I then enforce. ~ John Taylor Gatto

True courage is cool and calm. The bravest of men have the least of a brutal, bullying insolence, and in the very time of danger are found the most serene and free. ~ Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 7th Earl Of Shaftesbury

The only thing that everyone needs to look out for is keeping the students reading through high school and thereafter. ~ Dave Eggers

AR 601-210 was necessary because conscientious objectors could not enlist as medical experiment volunteers when there was no active draft program, according to prior Army regulations. This meant that the supply of WHITECOAT volunteers was cut off at the end of the Vietnam War. ~ Colin A. Ross

One of the most painful parts of teaching mathematics is seeing students damaged by the cult of the genius. The genius cult tells students it's not worth doing mathematics unless you're the best at mathematics, because those special few are the only ones whose contributions matter. We don't treat any other subject that way! I've never heard a student say, "I like Hamlet, but I don't really belong in AP English - that kid who sits in the front row knows all the plays, and he started reading Shakespeare when he was nine!" Athletes don't quit their sport just because one of their teammates outshines them. And yet I see promising young mathematicians quit every year, even though they love mathematics, because someone in their range of vision was "ahead" of them. ~ Jordan Ellenberg

What are you doing here? Tell me why you are here. If you are not here to win a national championship, you're in the wrong place. You boys are special. I don't want my players to be like other students. I want special people. You can learn a lot on the football field that isn't taught in the home, the church, or the classroom. There are going to be days when you think you've got no more to give and then you're going to give plenty more. You are going to have pride and class. You are going to be very special. You are going to win the national championship for Alabama. ~ Bear Bryant

Hard as it is to imagine, there's a move afoot in Congress to take away the public's free online access to tax-funded medical research findings. That would be bad for medical discovery, bad for patients looking for the latest research results, and another rip-off of the American taxpayer. ~ Richard J. Roberts

For some students, especially in the sciences, the knowledge gained in college may be directly relevant to graduate study. For almost all students, a liberal arts education works in subtle ways to create a web of knowledge that will illumine problems and enlighten judgment on innumerable occasions in later life. ~ Derek Bok

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 man who knows how will always be the student, but the man who knows why will continue to be the instructor. ~ Ed Parker

As soon as I graduated from high school I was off to the biggest college my parents could afford, Colorado University at Boulder, having seen students there who looked a lot like Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. ~ Susan Schneider

There is no medical proof that television causes brain damage - at least from over five feet away. In fact, TV is probably the least physically harmful of all the narcotics known to man. ~ Christopher Lehmann-Haupt

Unlike animals, we are able to produce emotional states through thinking," she says. "A zebra is only going to be horrendously stressed if a lion is chasing it, but my students can get themselves in the same state by worrying about their midterm." And, she points out, it's much easier for us to think ourselves into worry than into happiness. People ~ Kara Platoni

It represents a place women go and are left confused because they do not hear the truth about abortion and their choices. They are in a sense abused by the medical procedures that are performed without quality medical instructions/information. It's a tragic place. ~ Abby Johnson

Perhaps the greatest psychological, spiritual, and medical need that all people have is the need for hope. ~ Billy Graham

The American people are beginning to think in new ways about health and illness ... Bernie Siegel is helping to define and open up these new frontiers. In this sense he is in the best medical tradition. ~ Norman Cousins

My ex-student, Idit Harel, who wrote a book, "Children Designs," has a documented story of a kid who was very shy, isolated and didn't talk much to other kids. She was a little overweight, and the other kids looked down on her for that reason.But then she made a discovery about how to do something on the computer. The discovery was picked up by other kids, and within a few weeks there was a total transformation. This kid was now in demand. And that changed her feeling about herself. ~ Seymour Papert

The sacrifices made by veterans and their willingness to fight in defense of our nation merit our deep respect and praise - and to the best in benefits and medical care. ~ Sue Kelly

There are lots of families who - who make irresponsible purchases. There are also a lot of families who have debt on credit cards because they use those credit cards to pay for medical bills. ~ Elizabeth Warren

Nick Dawson, a leader of the Society of Participatory Medicine, uses Evernote as his electronic medical record, pulling in data from sensors and sharing with providers or family members.64 ~ Eric Topol

All of us struggle to realize something Patrice spent years telling me, as I took on one position or another: "It's not about you, dear." She often needed to remind me that, whatever people were feeling-happy, sad, frightened, or confused-it was unlikely it had anything to do with me. They had received a gift, or lost a friend, or gotten a medical test result, or couldn't understand why their love wasn't calling them back. It was all about their lives, their troubles, their hopes and dreams. Not mine. The nature of human existence makes it hard for us-or at least for me-to come to that understanding naturally. After all, I can only experience the world through me. That tempts all of us to believe everything we think, everything we hear, everything we see, is all about us. I think we all do this.

But a leader constantly has to train him- or herself to think otherwise. This is an important insight for a leader, in two respects. First, it allows you to relax a bit, secure in the knowledge that you aren't that important. Second, knowing people aren't focused on you should drive you to try to imagine what they are focused on. I see this as the heart of emotional intelligence, the ability to imagine the feelings and perspective of another "me". Some seem to be born with a larger initial deposit of emotional intelligence, but all of us can develop it with practice. ~ James Comey

I found early on in teaching, if you're too blunt an instrument, the students discredit you and think you're just being mean. They're not interested in what you have to say. ~ Tim Gunn

When the students were killed at Kent State, the cast voted to do a demonstration from the stage, and I abstained. ~ Holly Near

Teaching methods are often inadequate for the goals faculties are trying to achieve. Important courses such as expository writing and foreign languages are frequently taught by untrained graduate students and underpaid adjunct teachers. ~ Derek Bok