Medical Students Quotes & Sayings

For those who must deal with human corpses regularly, it is easier (and, I suppose, more accurate) to think of them as objects, not people. For most physicians, objectification is mastered their first year of medical school, in the gross anatomy lab, or "gross lab," as it is casually and somewhat aptly known. To help depersonalize the human form that students will be expected to sink knives into and eviscerate, anatomy lab personnel often swathe the cadavers in gauze and encourage students to unwrap as they go, part by part. — Mary Roach

Stress and sleep deprivation had a funny way of liberating the mind from previously held truisms, replacing them with a more compliant desperation. — David Z. Hirsch

I tell [medical students] that they are the luckiest persons on earth to be in medical school, and to forget all this worry about H.M.O.'s and keep your eye on helping the patient. It's the best time ever to be a doctor because you can heal and treat conditions that were untreatable even a couple of years ago. — Joseph Murray

Percent of medical students take no course in geriatrics, — Atul Gawande

What it needed was a subtle but significant change in presentation. The students needed to know how to fit the tetanus stuff into their lives; the addition of the map and the times when the shots were available shifted the booklet from an abstract lesson in medical risk - a lesson no different from the countless other academic lessons they had received over their academic career - to a practical and personal piece of medical advice. And — Anonymous

Babies used to make me nervous, but these squirmy things are awesome once you've read the manual. — David Z. Hirsch

Sometimes we called one another by our future doctor names. We did it partly to be funny, but mostly because we liked it when people did it back to us. — David Z. Hirsch

Students who have attended my [medical] lectures may remember that I try not only to teach them what we know, but also to realise how little this is: in every direction we seem to travel but a very short way before we are brought to a stop; our eyes are opened to see that our path is beset with doubts, and that even our best-made knowledge comes but too soon to an end. — Clifford Allbutt

There have been some medical schools in which somewhere along the assembly line, a faculty member has informed the students, not so much by what he said but by what he did, that there is an intimate relation between curing and caring. — Ashley Montagu

I desire no other epitaph - no hurry about it, I may say - than the statement that I taught medical students in the wards, as I regard this as by far the most useful and important work I have been called upon to do. — William Osler

Everything teeters between pathos and bathos: here you are, violating society's most fundamental taboos and yet formaldehyde is a powerful appetite stimulant, so you also crave a burrito. — Paul Kalanithi

Montpellier produced nearly 40 percent of all physicians in France, but the university had a troubled reputation as a party school where medical students were just as likely to drink and cavort with prostitutes as they were to learn the intricacies of the Hippocratic corpus. — Holly Tucker

While in medical school, I was drafted into the U.S. Army with the other medical students as part of the wartime training program, and naturalized American citizen in 1943. I greatly enjoyed my medical studies, which at the Medical College of Virginia were very clinically oriented. — Baruj Benacerraf

Coach Slader caught up followed closely by a trail of curious students all as surprised as I at this turn of events.Coach spoke in a delicate voice, like he didn't want to spook a dangerous animal.
"Jayden, what are you doing?"
"She needs medical attention." The guy didn't pause stride.
"Yes, but - "
"I'm taking her to the nurse."
"Okay, but - "
"She's too weak to walk."
I huffed. "I am not. Put me down."
In one swift movement the boy stopped, dumped me on my feet and stepped back. My knees buckled and before you could say "Bob's your uncle" he scooped me up again and kept walking. A chorus of giggles erupted behind us.
"See," he said.I put my arms around his neck and shut up. — A&E Kirk

Wouldn't it be great,as Scott Peck suggests, if all medical students had to undergo the symptoms and feeling of a spectrum of illnesses. From acute infections to terminal cancer - and Kuru, the laughing sickness. Just a month for each exposure, controlled of course, and a good heavy dose of excruciating pain. So they'll know what that feels like. — William S. Burroughs

My opportunity to design school choice systems began in 2003 with a phone call from Jeremy Lack at the New York City Department of Education. He knew of my work on the medical match and wondered if similar efforts might help reorganize the dysfunctional, congested system then used to match students to high schools. — Alvin E. Roth

The worst performers and the best performers are givers; takers and matchers are more likely to land in the middle. This pattern holds up across the board. The Belgian medical students with the lowest grades have unusually high giver scores, but so do the students with the highest grades. Over the course of medical school, being a giver accounts for 11 percent higher grades. Even in sales, I found that the least productive salespeople had 25 percent higher giver scores than average performers - but so did the most productive salespeople. The top performers were givers, and they averaged 50 percent more annual revenue than the takers and matchers. Givers dominate the bottom and the top of the success ladder. Across occupations, if you examine the link between reciprocity styles and success, the givers are more likely to become champs - not only chumps. — Adam M. Grant

The traditional gross anatomy lab represented a sort of sink-or-swim mentality about dealing with death. To cope with what was being asked of them, medical students had to find ways to desensitize themselves. They quickly learned to objectify cadavers, to think of the dead as structures and tissues, and not a former human being. Humor--at the cadaver's expense--was tolerated, condoned even. — Mary Roach

By Mamun's time medical schools were extremely active in Baghdad. The first free public hospital was opened in Baghdad during the Caliphate of Haroon-ar-Rashid. As the system developed, physicians and surgeons were appointed who gave lectures to medical students and issued diplomas to those who were considered qualified to practice. The first hospital in Egypt was opened in 872 AD and thereafter public hospitals sprang up all over the empire from Spain and the Maghrib to Persia. — John Bagot Glubb

One of the first things we teach medical students is to listen to the patient by taking a careful medical history. Ninety percent of the time, you can arrive at an uncannily accurate diagnosis by paying close attention, using physical examination and sophisticated lab test to confirm your hunch (and to increase the bill to the insurance company). — V.S. Ramachandran

Sophia was asked to speak to the students of a local medical school.
"Sophia, what do we need to be better doctors?" the students asked.
"Doctors," Sophia said, "need strong stomachs and strong powers of observation." Then she opened a canister. The putrid smell quickly moved through the classroom. Sophia stuck a finger in the jar, pulled it up, and then licked it. She passed the jar around encouraging each doctor in training to do the same. Each did, and though many felt nauseas, no one got sick.
"You all have very strong stomachs," she said. "But your powers of observation need some work."
"What do you mean?" they asked. "We did just what you did."
"There is one difference," she replied. "The finger I dipped in the jar was not the finger I licked. — David W. Jones

Some Iranian doctors from Europe and America go to Iran and operate for free or teach medical students there. The other day, I met a gentlemen who is helping to protect wildlife in Iran. It's good that many of them don't forget about their country. It's important. — Farah Diba

A doctor's mission should not be to prevent death, but more importantly it should be to improve the quality of life. — Abhijit Naskar

Medical education does not exist to provide students with a way of making a living, but to ensure the health of the community. — Rudolf Virchow

When I ask my medical students to describe their image of a woman who elects to birth with a midwife rather than with an obstetrician, they generally describe a woman who wears long cotton skirts, braids her hair, eats only organic vegan food, does yoga, and maybe drives a VW microbus. — Alice Dreger

When one hears hoofbeats, medical students are taught, one must think of horses, not zebras. But the doctor who sees my blood count will surely think of horses. He will arrive at a perfectly logical conclusion. It will no occur to him that, this time, it is truly a zebra galloping by. — Tess Gerritsen

A respect for authority is the basis for most medical education. Students may become so used to memorising that they become prey to the illusion that the reason for learning to parrot lectures and textbooks is that they are the 'truth'. — Petr Skrabanek

Students undergo a conversion in the third year of medical school - not pre-clinical to clinical, but pre-cynical to cynical. — Abraham Verghese

I was under the care of a couple of medical students who couldn't diagnose a decapitation. — Jeffrey Bernard

Being a doctor, you are not supposed to give vent to any signs of revulsion on encountering the most noxious of odours or the most gruesome of sights. — Anurag Shourie

School districts around the country, and the taxpayers that support them, have a moral right to the information the NFL might have concerning the medical aspects of the game, and to assess the risks to the students in their charge. Colleges have a moral right to that information for the same reasons. — Charlie Pierce

The American Medical Association not only represents the roughly 800,000 practicing physicians in the United States, but also sets the official standards for treatment for virtually every patient malady, and is instrumental in directing and controlling the supply of doctors entering medical school. By virtue of an affiliated licensing body called the Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME), the AMA determines which medical schools receive its official accreditation, and for over a hundred years it has been very stingy with its approval process. Furthermore, the AMA together with its close affiliate, the American Association of Medical Colleges, conducts regular studies to assess the necessary supply of medical doctors and advises existing medical schools as well as state and federal regulators as to optimal admission levels for new students - and these too have been artificially and unnecessarily constricted[22]. — Reid Jenner

There was a golden period that I look back upon with great regret, in which the cheapest of experimental animals were medical students. Graduate students were even better. In the old days, if you offered a graduate student a thiamine-deficient diet, he gladly went on it, for that was the only way he could eat. Science is getting to be more and more difficult. — George Wald

GRAVE, n. A place in which the dead are laid to await the coming of the medical student. — Ambrose Bierce

Many medical students, like most American patients, confuse science and technology. They think that what it means to be a scientific doctor is to bring to bear the maximum amount of technology on any given patient. And this makes them dangerous. — Alice Dreger

My medical students. Two cups of human misery in short white coats. One is male and the other one female, and they both have names. That's all I can ever remember about them. — Josh Bazell

Nancy [Kassebaum] and I worked on a women's health agenda when I first came. Women were not included in the protocols at NIH, the famous study, 'take an aspirin a day, keep the doctor, you know, a heart attack away.' It was done on ten thousand male medical students. — Barbara Mikulski

Corporate governance is a huge issue too. We don't have women on these corporate boards. More than half of the students in law school are women, more than half of the women, I think, in medical school now are women. — Claire McCaskill

Like countless first-year medical students, immersed in the symptoms of one disease after another, I am alert to the tingles and pangs, the throbs and quivers of my mortal body, each one of which is potentially a sign of the end. — Siri Hustvedt

In 1970, Dean Robert Ebert offered me the Chair of Pathology at Harvard Medical School. I moved to Harvard because I missed the university environment and, more particularly, the stimulating interaction with the eager, enthusiastic, and unprejudiced young minds of the students and fellows. — Baruj Benacerraf

We have the sense that medical students come to medicine with a great capacity to understand the suffering of patients. And then by the end of the third year they completely lose that ability, partly because we teach them the specialized language of medicine. — Abraham Verghese

As we medical students saw it, the failure of those around Ivan Ilyich to offer comfort or to acknowledge what is happening to him was a failure of character and culture. — Atul Gawande

Both David and Marcus, I came to realize, though they seemed happy enough, and looked forward to being doctors, had a certain sadness, a sense of loss and renunciation, about other interests they had given up.... Both became medical students, in part, to defer their call-up. But with this, I think, they deferred their other aspirations, a deferment that seemed permanent and irreversible by the time they returned to London. — Oliver Sacks

There's a true schizophrenia where if you say to voters, you know, do you think the federal government spends too much money and they should spend less, they say yeah, absolutely. Then you name specific things, like Pell grants for students and they say, no, not that. How 'bout NIH, medical research funding? Nah, you really shouldn't cut that. And pretty soon you've proved that what the American public is against is arithmetic. — Bill Gates

Every new startup business creates new opportunities. It doesn't matter whether you have a new app for college students or a home medical device for senior citizens; there are other multibillion noncompetitive corporations that are spending millions of dollars trying to market their goods and services to your same audience. — Jay Samit

According to his diary he worked hard and without scruple to discover what he could on his own. Of course, in principle I have no objection to using human subjects, as long as they are already dead," she adds. "Have you heard of the anatomy theatre? It is where the medical school's dissections are performed. They use bears, monkeys, dogs, and human corpses too, when the weather is cool enough. The students have been known to kidnap a body the night before its dissection, dress it up, and take it for a gondola ride down the canal. — Maryrose Wood

For the most part, people use "empathy" to mean everything good. For instance, many medical schools have courses in empathy. But if you look at what they mean, they just want medical students to be nicer to their patients, to listen to them, to respect them, to understand them. What's not to like? If they were really teaching empathy, then I'd say there is a world of problems there. — Paul Bloom

Out similar characteristics in everyone. For example, law students were undisciplined and competitive, medical students strict and lacking a sense of humor, philosophy — Donato Carrisi

So I applied to medical school and received a scholarship at Washington University in St. Louis. Washington University turned out to be a lucky choice. The faculty was scholarly and dedicated and accessible to students. — Daniel Nathans

There are, Jefferson said, two classes of "disputants" that are especially common. The "first is . . . young students . . . the other consists of the ill-tempered & rude men in society, who have taken up a passion for politics." From both, Jefferson urged, "keep aloof, as you would from the infected subjects of yellow fever or pestilence. Consider yourself, when with them, as among the patients of Bedlam, needing medical more than moral counsel. — Davidson Butler