While all doctors treat diseases, neurosurgeons' work is the crucible of identity. Every operation on the brain is, by necessity, a manipulation of the substance of our selves.
Interpretation
Neurosurgeons play a unique role in shaping our identity through their work on the brain.
This quote emphasizes the profound impact that neurosurgeons have on patients' identities through their surgical interventions. Unlike other medical professionals who treat illnesses, neurosurgeons operate on the brain, which is central to our sense of self and consciousness, thus intertwining their medical expertise with the deeper aspects of human existence and individuality.
In practice
In a discussion about the ethics of medical practices, this quote can highlight the unique responsibilities of neurosurgeons.
Science is based on reproducibility and manufactured objectivity. As strong as that makes its ability to generate claims about matter and energy, it also makes scientific knowledge inapplicable to the existential, visceral nature of human life, which is unique and subjective and unpredictable.
Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue.
Putting lifestyle first is how you find a job - not a calling.
The root of disaster means a star coming apart, and no image expresses better the look in a patient's eyes when hearing a neurosurgeon's diagnosis.
I have sat with countless patients and families to discuss grim prognoses: It's one of the most important jobs physicians have. It's easier when the patient is 94, in the last stages of dementia, and has a severe brain bleed. For young people like me - I am 36 - given a diagnosis of cancer, there aren't many words.
Everyone succumbs to finitude. I suspect I am not the only one who reaches this pluperfect state. Most ambitions are either achieved or abandoned; either way, they belong to the past. The future, instead of the ladder toward the goals of life, flattens out into a perpetual present.
One may well find oneself beginning to doubt whether all this could conceivably be the product of an enormous lottery presided over by natural selection, blindly picking the rare winners from among numbers drawn at utter random...nevertheless although the miracle of life stands "explained" it does not strike us as any less miraculous. As Francois Mauriac wrote, What this professor says is far more incredible than what we poor Christians believe.
The complete irresponsibility of man for his actions and his nature is the bitterest drop which he who understands must swallow.
Whatever is arising in this moment, whatever condition, is part of the isness of life and therefore accepting it fully makes you an expression of the enormous power of life itself-true intelligence, which only comes when you stop obstructing the power of the present moment.
Blow the candle out, I don't need to see what my thoughts look like.
An honest private man often grows cruel and abandoned when converted into an absolute prince. Give a man power of doing what he pleases with impunity, you extinguish his fear, and consequently overturn in him one of the great pillars of morality.
My wife and I, unlike many intellectuals, spent five years working on assembly lines. We came to fully understand the criticisms of the industrial age, in which you are an appendage of a machine that sets the pace.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.