Samuel Shem Quotes & Sayings

But gomers are not just dear old people," said Fats. "Gomers are human beings who have lost what goes into being human beings. They want to die, and we will not let them. We're cruel to the gomers, by saving them, and they're cruel to us, by fighting tooth and nail against our trying to save them. They hurt us, we hurt them. — Samuel Shem

Only write if you can't not. — Samuel Shem

Basch: So why don't you ask her out?
The Runt: I'm scared she wouldn't like me and say no.
-So what? What have you got to lose?
-The possibility -if she says no- that she might have said yes. Whatever I do, I don't want to lose that possibility. — Samuel Shem

Life's like a penis; When it's soft you can't beat it; When it's hard you get screwed. - The Fat Man, Medical Resident in The House of God — Samuel Shem

The patient is the one with the disease — Samuel Shem

Law XIII. THE DELIVERY OF MEDICAL CARE IS TO DO AS MUCH NOTHING AS POSSIBLE — Samuel Shem

It ain't easy to do nothing, now that society is telling everyone that their body is fundamentally flawed and about to self-destruct. People are afraid they're on the verge of death all the time — Samuel Shem

I'm telling you that the cure is the disease. The main source of the illness in this world is the doctor's own illness; his compulsion to try to cure and his fraudulent belief that he can. — Samuel Shem

There is no body cavity that cannot be reached with a number fourteen needle and a good strong arm. — Samuel Shem

I realized with alarm that I hadn't learned how to save anyone at all, not Dr. Sanders or Lazarus or Jimmy or Saul or Anna O., and that what I was thrilled about was learning how to save myself. — Samuel Shem

The thing is," said Gilheeny, "is that we live in constant fear of our lives. It makes the blood pressure elevate like an Arabian geyser, and the tension headaches we get would knock the balls off a bull with the twist in the maxillary sinuses themselves. — Samuel Shem

I make my patients feel like they're still part of life, part of some grand nutty scheme instead of alone with their diseases. With me, they still feel part of the human race. — Samuel Shem

To do nothing for the gomers was to do something, and the more conscientiously I did nothing the better they got. — Samuel Shem

At a cardiac arrest, the first procedure is to take your own pulse — Samuel Shem

It's an incredible paradox that being a doctor is so degrading and yet is so valued by society — Samuel Shem

I've been drunk while swimming in the river, at noon the temperature of water, air, and body all the same, so that I can't tell where body ends and water begins and it's a melding of the universe, with the river curling round our bodies, cool and warm rushes intermingling in lost patterns, filling all times and all depths. — Samuel Shem

I found myself thinking of Potts as a tragic figure, a guy who'd been a happy towheaded kid you'd love to take fishing with you, who'd mistakenly invested in academic medicine when he'd have been happy in his family business, and who'd become a splattered mess on the parking lot of a hospital in a city he'd despised. What had been the seductiveness of medicine? Why? — Samuel Shem

To look forward to whatever flowed through the doors. To save a life? Two lives? I felt proud. The burden of treating the intractable, untreatable, unplaceable, unwanted, had been replaced by the fantasy of being a real doctor, dealing with real disease. — Samuel Shem

You know what they say: It's better to have dyspareuned than never to have pareuned at all. — Samuel Shem

Gomers are human beings who have lost what goes into being human beings. They want to die, and we will not let them. — Samuel Shem

We were putting into these gomers our fear of death, but who knew if they feared death? Perhaps they welcomed death like a dear long-lost cousin, grown old but still known, coming to visit, relieving the loneliness, the failing of the senses, the fury of the half-blind looking into the mirror and not recognizing who is looking back, a dear friend, a dear reliever, a healer who would be with them for an eternity, the same eternity as the long ago, before birth. — Samuel Shem

Sometimes, drunk, I ruminate on the state of my liver, and think of all the cirrhotics I have watched turn yellow and die. They either bleed out, raving, coughing up and drowning in blood from ruptured esophageal veins, or, in coma, they slip away, slip blissfully away down the yellow-brick ammonia-scented road to oblivion. — Samuel Shem

This wine makes me feel like I'm bathed in amnion, breathless, fed by the motherbloodflow in the umbilical vein, fetal, slippery and tumbling over and over in the warmth of the beating womb, warm amnion, warmnion. — Samuel Shem

Yes, last year in interviewing. Empathy is when you repeat the last three words the patient says and nod your head. — Samuel Shem

A BMS hears hoofbeats outside his window, the first thing he thinks of is a zebra — Samuel Shem