Quotes from Samuel Shem

Paranoia's OK, said Berry, it's just a more primitive defense. If you think someone's watching you, you think you're not alone.

when Mrs. Risenshein arrested and I was surprised to hear myself cursing under my breath as I resuscitated her, "I wish she would die so I could just go to sleep," and I was shocked when I realized that I'd just wished a human being dead so I could go to sleep. Animal. Eat

Just remember, though—your freedom means my freedom too.

You bet," said Eddie. "In Derm, you only need to know three things: 'If it's dry, you wet it; if it's wet, you dry it; and if you don't know, you use steroids.' No emergencies. Millions. Most popular choice of med students now—that and emergency care. These young docs go for the NOPR: 'No Ongoing Patient Relationship.' Just screens and money.

And yet that hardness brings out the softness in us all

And yet that hardness brings out the softness in us all," said the redhead, "the soul in us that makes us cry at births and weddings and wakes and those sad times when the pebbles of the gravedigger dance upon the coffin lid. Sure, and it makes us more human. Yes, this emergency room is not a mean bad place, now, is it?

The patient is the one with the disease

Life's like a penis; When it's soft you can't beat it; When it's hard you get screwed. - The Fat Man, Medical Resident in The House of God

At a cardiac arrest, the first procedure is to take your own pulse

It's an incredible paradox that being a doctor is so degrading and yet is so valued by society

Basch: So why don't you ask her out? The Runt: I'm scared she wouldn't like me and say no. -So what? What have you got to lose? -The possibility -if she says no- that she might have said yes. Whatever I do, I don't want to lose that possibility.

Every intern makes mistakes. The important thing is neither to make the same mistakes twice nor to make a whole bunch of mistakes all at once.

Gomers are human beings who have lost what goes into being human beings. They want to die, and we will not let them.

There is no body cavity that cannot be reached with a number fourteen needle and a good strong arm.

Law XIII. THE DELIVERY OF MEDICAL CARE IS TO DO AS MUCH NOTHING AS POSSIBLE

This is the basic human story. We are all on the same journey. Every one of us will suffer—there's no way around it. The crucial question is not how to avoid suffering, it's how we move through it.

I realized with alarm that I hadn't learned how to save anyone at all, not Dr. Sanders or Lazarus or Jimmy or Saul or Anna O., and that what I was thrilled about was learning how to save myself.

It ain't easy to do nothing, now that society is telling everyone that their body is fundamentally flawed and about to self-destruct. People are afraid they're on the verge of death all the time

I found myself thinking of Potts as a tragic figure, a guy who'd been a happy towheaded kid you'd love to take fishing with you, who'd mistakenly invested in academic medicine when he'd have been happy in his family business, and who'd become a splattered mess on the parking lot of a hospital in a city he'd despised. What had been the seductiveness of medicine? Why?

I make them feel like they're still part of life, part of some grand nutty scheme instead of alone with their diseases, which, most of the time and especially in the Clinic, don't hardly exist at all. With me, they feel they're still part of the human race.

A BMS hears hoofbeats outside his window, the first thing he thinks of is a zebra

We were putting into these gomers our fear of death, but who knew if they feared death? Perhaps they welcomed death like a dear long-lost cousin, grown old but still known, coming to visit, relieving the loneliness, the failing of the senses, the fury of the half-blind looking into the mirror and not recognizing who is looking back, a dear friend, a dear reliever, a healer who would be with them for an eternity, the same eternity as the long ago, before birth.

The main source of illness in this world is the doctor's own illness: his compulsion to try to cure and his fraudulent belief that he can.

It's our job to tell them that imperfect health is and always has been perfect health, and that most of the things that go wrong with their bodies we can't do much about. So maybe we do make diagnoses; big deal. We hardly ever cure.