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

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.

Death undoes us less, sometimes, than the hope that it will never come.

...that the doctor being himself a mortal man, should be diligent and tender in relieving his suffering patients, inasmuch as he himself must one day be a like sufferer.