A minor operation is one that is done on someone else.

Each is like a river that leaves behind its name and shape, the whole course of its path , to vanish into the vast sea of God..

Cutting for Stone is nothing short of masterful -a riveting tale of love, medicine, and the complex dynamic of twin brothers. It is beautifully conce….

The heart is pure theater throbbing in its cage palpably as any nightingale..

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

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….

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 o….

Autopsies give us the facts but not the truth..

The Country Doctor Revisited is a fine achievement. Purporting to be an overview of the practice of medicine in rural areas, it is a splendid portrai….

The liver, that great maroon snail: No wave of emotion sweeps it. Neither music nor mathematics gives it pause in its appointed tasks..

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 wha….

I contemplate the body, dead and diseased as well as alive and healthy..

Surgery is the red flower that blooms among the leaves and thorns that are the rest of medicine..

You cannot separate passion from pathology any more than you can separate a person's spirit from his body..