Quotes About Surgery

In 1936, shortly after the first lobotomies were performed in Lisbon, the procedure came to our side of the sea, where it was adapted with all-American vigor, so much so that by the late 1950s, more than twenty thousand patients had had lobotomies and the surgery was being used to "cure" everything from mental retardation to homosexuality to criminal insanity.

Medical chests of the era contained a brass mortar and pestle to grind compounds, and a selection of surgical

You might reflect on how a physician, in order to help an individual heal themselves, will sometimes cut into the individual's body and perform procedures which in any other context would be considered life-threatening.

Normally, when they opened up the womb, they were presented with the top of the baby's head, and then with its face, its eyes squinched tight. All they could see inside Chiasoka was a mess of tubes, like a bowlful of thick cannelloni, although some of the tubes appeared to have rows of small nobbles on them, which could have been rudimentary fingers.

Either way, I'd brought a pair of hands and enough general surgical experience to be useful. If you'd ever had be a saint to heal someone, medicine would have been doomed from the start.

the success of Egyptian surgery in setting broken bones is very fully demonstrated in the large number of well-joined fractures found in the ancient skeletons.

Here we see the word brain occurring for the first time in human speech, as far as it is known to us; and in discussing injuries affecting the brain, we note the surgeon's effort to delimit his terms as he selects for specialization a series of common and current words to designate three degrees of injury to the skull indicated in modern surgery by the terms fracture, compound fracture, and compound comminuted fracture, all of which the ancient commentator carefully explains.

Unfortunately I had an ankle problem and underwent three operations.

Since I had my gastric bypass surgery in 1998, I eat like a bird. Unfortunately, that bird is a California condor.

Post-operatively the transplanted kidney functioned immediately with a dramatic improvement in the patient's renal and cardiopulmonary status.

I've considered having my nose fixed. But I didn't trust anyone enough. If I could do it myself with a mirror.

I have operated on dozens and dozens of people to improve deficient features only to find that, after surgery, they replaced this real physical fault in their minds with a nonsensical belief which continued their unswerving fixation on their inferiority. Their negative beliefs varied; their movement toward failure was the same kind of mechanism.

What loomed was a flayed man with his brisket tacked open like a cooling beef and his skull peeled, blue and bulbous and palely luminescent, black grots his eyeholes and bloody mouth gaped tongueless. The traveler had seized his fingers in his jaws, but it was not alone this horror that he cried. Beyond the flayed man dimly adumbrate another figure paled, for his surgeons move about the world even as you and I.

she said. He had called me right before he was going to be operated on for cancer, and he was still keeping it a secret, she explained. I decided

nobody knew, she said. He had called me right before he was going to be operated on for

To countervail (as I hope) my lifelong political set against just about all of this president's positions, I confess to a very strong sense of the dreadfulness of the step of removal, of the deep wounding such a step must inflict on the country, and thus approach it as one would approach high-risk major surgery, to be resorted to only when the rightness of diagnosis and treatment is sure.

There's no pressure in baseball. Pressure is when the doctor is getting ready to cut you, take your heart out, and put it on a table.

Robbins had opened Gabby up. Her charred skin was peeled back, and her ribs were removed. She was pink inside, like steak that had been burned on a high heat but remained raw in the middle.

A statistical analysis properly conducted is a delicate dissection of uncertainties, a surgery of suppositions. The surgeon must guard carefully against false incisions...

I got the bill for my surgery. Now I know what those doctors were wearing masks for.

The best surgeon is he that has been well hacked himself.

Truth, like surgery, may hurt, but it cures.

Dr. Henry Cotton, a figure straight out of a horror movie.

Darling, the history of medicine is the history of the violation of natural law. The Church—and that includes the Protestant as well as the Catholic—tried to stop the use of anesthetics because it was natural law for a woman to have pain while giving birth. And it was natural law for people to die of sickness. And natural law that the body not be cut open and repaired.