Richard Selzer - Mortal Lessons: Notes on the Art of Surgery (1974)

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The surgeon knows all the parts of the brain but he does not know his patient's dreams.

Richard Selzer

And if the surgeon is like a poet, then the scars you have made on countless bodies are like verses into the fashioning of which you have poured your soul. I think that if years later I were to see the trace from an old incision of mine, I should know it at once, as one recognizes his pet expressions.

Richard Selzer

A man does not know whose hands will stroke from him the last bubbles of his life. That alone should make him kinder to strangers.

Richard Selzer

If people understood that doctors weren't divine, perhaps the odor of malpractice might diminish.

Richard Selzer

Thus is the fruit of the Earth taken, its flesh torn. Thus is it given over standing, toward rot. It is the principle of corruption, the death of what is, the birth of what is to be. You are wine.

Richard Selzer

You do not die all at once. Some tissues live on for minutes, even hours, giving still their little cellular shrieks, molecular echoes of the agony of the whole corpus.

Richard Selzer