Quotes from Rachel Clarke

Women, as we know, used to be judged incapable of medicine. That changed in 1876, when, after a tenacious fight led by Britain's first female doctor, Elizabeth Garret Anderson, the law was changed to prohibit women's exclusion from medical schools. Now, more than 140 years later, female medical students outnumber men. Yet, according to Lawson, our predisposition to avoid antisocial hours and put family before career means we are more

But what dominates palliative medicine is not the proximity to death, but the best bits of living. Kindness, courage, love, tenderness – these are the qualities that so often saturate a person's last days. It can be chaotic, messy, almost violent with grief, but I am surrounded at work by human beings at their most remarkable, unable to retreat from the fact and the ache of our impermanence, yet getting on with living and loving all the same.

the most frightening experience of my professional life was not those hours spent under fire in Congo's killing fields but my first night on call in a UK teaching hospital.

Perhaps it is the fear of being seen to do the wrong thing – the embarrassment of mistaking a patient's minor unwellness for a full-blown emergency – that holds young doctors back from calling the cavalry. This reticence has the potential to cost patients their lives.

In medicine, needless to say, the moment you feel as if you've mastered something is invariably the point at which your next experience will knock you straight back down to earth.

Using fear to build political capital is a tactic as old as politics.