Students undergo a conversion in the third year of medical school - not pre-clinical to clinical, but pre-cynical to cynical.
Interpretation
Medical students often become cynical after their third year due to the harsh realities of clinical practice.
This quote highlights a significant transformation that medical students experience during their education. In their third year, they often shift from an idealistic view of medicine to a more cynical one, shaped by the challenges and emotional toll of clinical training and exposure to the difficulties of patient care. This change reflects how the training process can affect their outlook and approach to both their profession and their patients.
In practice
In a medical school graduation speech to highlight the importance of maintaining empathy.
The flip side of suicide is that it leaves a lingering question in the minds of the people who survived. It's like a cancer that's metastasized. The suicide is the cancer and the metastasis is all these people saying, Why? Why? Why?
We're losing a ritual. We're losing a ritual that I believe is transformative, transcendent, and is at the heart of the patient-physician relationship.
I still find the best way to understand a hospitalized patient whose care I am taking over is not by staring at the computer screen but by going to see the patient; it's only at the bedside that I can figure out what is important.
It was all I had, all I've ever had, the only currency, the only proof that I was alive. Memory.
My VIP patients often regret so many things on their deathbeds. They regret the bitterness they'll leave in people's hearts. They realize the no money, no church service, no eulogy, no funeral procession no matter how elaborate, can remove the legacy of a mean spirit.
You are an instrument of God. Don't leave the instrument sitting in its case, my son. Play! Leave no part of your instrument unexplored. Why settle for 'Three Blind Mice' when you can can play the 'Gloria'? No, not Bach's 'Gloria.' Yours! Your 'Gloria' lives within you. The greatest sin is not finding it, ignoring what God made possible in you.
Only when the child is able to identify its own center with the center of the universe does education really begin.
First let a man teach himself, and then he will be taught by others.
I'm a big advocate of a work-for-pay setup rather than an allowance that isn't attached to chores - it's a great way to impart the value of money to your children.
A recluse without books and ink is already in life a dead man.
I speak as a man of the world to men of the world; and I say to you, Search the Scriptures! The Bible is the book of all others, to be read at all ages, and in all conditions of human life; not to be read once or twice or thrice through, and then laid aside, but to be read in small portions of one or two chapters every day, and never to be intermitted, unless by some overruling necessity.
When you're learning, especially to write, unless you're some incredibly gifted writer, a young Malcom Gladwell, say, you need to be imitating people. You need to be imitating how they make their work, how they structure it, how they design the pieces. It gives you chops; it gives you moves.
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