Samuel Shem Quotes

#1. There is no body cavity that cannot be reached with a number fourteen needle and a good strong arm.

Samuel Shem

#2. This wine makes me feel like I'm bathed in amnion, breathless, fed by the motherbloodflow in the umbilical vein, fetal, slippery and tumbling over and over in the warmth of the beating womb, warm amnion, warmnion.

Samuel Shem

#3. At a cardiac arrest, the first procedure is to take your own pulse

Samuel Shem

#4. Law XIII. THE DELIVERY OF MEDICAL CARE IS TO DO AS MUCH NOTHING AS POSSIBLE

Samuel Shem

#5. I make my patients feel like they're still part of life, part of some grand nutty scheme instead of alone with their diseases. With me, they still feel part of the human race.

Samuel Shem

#6. Yes, last year in interviewing. Empathy is when you repeat the last three words the patient says and nod your head.

Samuel Shem

#7. To look forward to whatever flowed through the doors. To save a life? Two lives? I felt proud. The burden of treating the intractable, untreatable, unplaceable, unwanted, had been replaced by the fantasy of being a real doctor, dealing with real disease.

Samuel Shem

#8. Basch: So why don't you ask her out?
The Runt: I'm scared she wouldn't like me and say no.
-So what? What have you got to lose?
-The possibility -if she says no- that she might have said yes. Whatever I do, I don't want to lose that possibility.

Samuel Shem

#9. Only write if you can't not.

Samuel Shem

#10. I'm telling you that the cure is the disease. The main source of the illness in this world is the doctor's own illness; his compulsion to try to cure and his fraudulent belief that he can.

Samuel Shem

#11. I realized with alarm that I hadn't learned how to save anyone at all, not Dr. Sanders or Lazarus or Jimmy or Saul or Anna O., and that what I was thrilled about was learning how to save myself.

Samuel Shem

#12. It ain't easy to do nothing, now that society is telling everyone that their body is fundamentally flawed and about to self-destruct. People are afraid they're on the verge of death all the time

Samuel Shem

#13. The thing is," said Gilheeny, "is that we live in constant fear of our lives. It makes the blood pressure elevate like an Arabian geyser, and the tension headaches we get would knock the balls off a bull with the twist in the maxillary sinuses themselves.

Samuel Shem

#14. It's an incredible paradox that being a doctor is so degrading and yet is so valued by society

Samuel Shem

#15. To do nothing for the gomers was to do something, and the more conscientiously I did nothing the better they got.

Samuel Shem

#16. You know what they say: It's better to have dyspareuned than never to have pareuned at all.

Samuel Shem

#17. Gomers are human beings who have lost what goes into being human beings. They want to die, and we will not let them.

Samuel Shem

#18. Life's like a penis; When it's soft you can't beat it; When it's hard you get screwed. - The Fat Man, Medical Resident in The House of God

Samuel Shem

#19. A BMS hears hoofbeats outside his window, the first thing he thinks of is a zebra

Samuel Shem

#20. The patient is the one with the disease

Samuel Shem