There are places where you can live only when you are healthy, in those places when you fall ill it's the end of you for most people there can__ afford medical care.

How's the blood-stream, my dear, invaluable little woman? How's the blood-stream?"..."It's quite comfortable, sir...I think, sir, thank yo

If there is one thing I'd learned about hospitals, it's that they aren't interested in healing you. They are interested in stabilizing you, and then everyone is supposed to move on. They go to stabilize some more people, and you go off to do whatever you do. Healing, if it happens at all, is done on your own, long after the hospital has submitted your final insurance paperwork.

Tell us please, what treatment in an emergency is administered by ear?"....I met his gaze and I did not blink. "Words of comfort," I said to my father.

Unhealthy behavior is actually common among doctors, who tend to know a lot about medicine but very little about health.

It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love. Dr. Juvenal Urbino noticed is as soon as he entered the still darkened house where he has hurried on an urgent call to attend a case that for him had lost all urgency many years before. The Antillean refugee Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, disabled war veteran, photographer of children, and his most sympathetic opponent in chess, had escaped the torments of memory with the aromatic fumes of gold cyanide.