Doctors always think anybody doing something they aren't is a quack; also they think all patients are idiots.
Interpretation
This quote reflects the bias and arrogance that can exist within the medical profession towards those who pursue unconventional methods or self-directed care.
Flannery O'Connor's quote critiques the medical establishment by highlighting the disdain some doctors feel towards alternative approaches to health and their condescending attitude towards patients. It underscores a broader commentary on expertise, authority, and the relationship between practitioners and those they serve, suggesting that an inflexible belief in one's own methods can lead to a lack of understanding and respect for individual choices in health care.
In practice
This quote could be used in a discussion about the healthcare system during a medical conference.
Let me make no bones about it: I write from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. Nothing is more repulsive to me than the idea of myself setting up a little universe of my own choosing and propounding a little immoralistic message. I write with a solid belief in all the Christian dogmas.
What people donβt realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross.
If you live today, you breath in nihilism ... it's the gas you breathe. If I hadn't had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now.
There won't be any biographies of me because, for only one reason, lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy.
Knowing who you are is good for one generation only. You haven't the foggiest idea where you stand now or who you are
He loved her because it was his nature to do so, but there were times when he could not endure her love for him. There were times when it became nothing but pure idiot mystery.
The traditional doctrine of man and not the measurement of skulls and footprints is the key for the understanding of that anthropos who, despite the rebellion of Promethean man against Heaven from the period of Renaissance and its aftermath, is still the inner man of every man, the reality which no human being can deny wherever and whenever he lives, the imprint of a theomorphic nature which no historical change and transformation can erase completely from the face of that creature called man.
We make an idol of truth itself; for truth apart from charity is not God, but His image and idol, which we must neither love nor worship.
Belgrade is the ugliest city in the world in the most beautiful place in the world.
We can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.
When we get out of the glass bottles of our ego, and when we escape like squirrels turning in the cages of our personality and get into the forests again, we shall shiver with cold and fright but things will happen to us so that we don't know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in, and passion will make our bodies taut with power, we shall stamp our feet with new power and old things will fall down, we shall laugh, and institutions will curl up like burnt paper.
Perfection has one grave defect: it is apt to be dull.
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