A physician is obligated to consider more than a diseased organ, more even than the whole man - he must view the man in his world.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of understanding a patient in the context of their entire life and environment, not just their medical condition.
Harvey Cushingβs quote highlights the need for physicians to take a holistic approach when treating patients. Rather than merely focusing on the physical symptoms or the specific illness, doctors should consider the broader context of a patient's life, including their social circumstances and personal experiences. This perspective fosters a deeper understanding of health and well-being, recognizing that medical care is intertwined with a person's environment and individual world.
In practice
During a medical conference when discussing patient-centered care.
In these days when science is clearly in the saddle and when our knowledge of disease is advancing at a breathless pace, we are apt to forget that not all can ride and that he also serves who waits and who applies what the horseman discovers.
I would like to see the day when somebody would be appointed surgeon somewhere who had no hands, for the operative part is the least part of the work.
For what am I to myself without You, but a guide to my own downfall?
It never occurred to him to be spiritually won over to the enemy. Many moderns, inured to a weak worship of intellect and force, might have wavered in their allegiance under this oppression of a great personality. . . . But this was a kind of modern meanness to which Syme could not sink even in his extreme morbidity. Like any man, he was coward enough to fear great force; but he was not coward enough to admire it.
We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes us receivers of its truth and organ of its activity. When we discern justice, when we discern truth, we do nothing by ourselves, but allow a passage to its beams. If we ask whence this comes, if we seek to pry into the soul that causes, all philosophy is at fault. Its presence or its absence is all we can affirm.
I theorize that there is a spectrum of consciousness available to human beings. At one end is material consciousness. At the other end is what we call 'field' consciousness, where a person is at one with the universe, perceiving the universe. Just by looking at our planet on the way back, I saw or felt a field consciousness state.
Self-esteem is the greatest sickness known to man or woman because it's conditional.
To me the biggest irony of this lifetime that I'm living is that for someone who thrives in the public eye in the creative ways that I do, I actually don't enjoy being in the public eye.
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