Quotes & Sayings About Surgeons

In some ways therapists have it harder than surgeons, who can often correct the
issue with one operation. There's no quick fix for emotional trauma. — Daria Snadowsky

Experience with tubercular patients would then help to train a new generation of specialist chest surgeons. In the second half of the 20th century, as the number of tuberculosis patients continued to decline and facilities were freed up, they were able to transfer their skills to other serious conditions within the thoracic cavity such as lung cancer, but that lay in the future. — Helen Bynum

I have a Bachelor in medicine, a Bachelor in surgery, and I am a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons. — Hasnat Khan

The fame of surgeons resembles the fame of actors, who live only during their lifetime and whose talent is no longer appreciable once they have disappeared. — Honore De Balzac

Surgeons always underestimate the pain and disability involved in what they do to people. — Robert Winston

U.S. surgeons operate on the wrong body part as often as 40 times a week. — Marty Makary

One of the reasons surgeons have so much trouble separating Siamese twins is that nobody gets to do many of them. On the table, the anatomy is so different from normal, that you're constantly trying to figure out, 'Can I cut this? Does this wire lead to what?' It's like trying to defuse a bomb. — Ben Carson

Nostalgia can be more painful than a surgeon's knife. — Anurag Shourie

Dr. Esserman, who directs the Carol Franc Buck Breast Care Center, is one of only a few surgeons in the United States willing to put women with D.C.I.S. on active surveillance instead of performing biopsies, lumpectomies or mastectomies. — Katie Hafner

The table was shocked. The entire class in fact. They'd heard tell of Civil War reenactments, but they were still occurring? The War Between the States was another time and another country. As was the South. Are barbers still surgeons? Is there still sharecropping? What about indoor plumbing? — T. Geronimo Johnson

The country was lumbering towards election day. Strike turned in early on Sunday and watched the day's gaffes, counterclaims and promises being tabulated on his portable TV. There was an air of joylessness in every news report he watched. The national debt was so huge that it was diffcult to comprehend. Cuts were coming, whoever won; deep, painful cuts; and sometimes, with their weasel words, the party leaders reminded Strike of the surgeons who had told him cautiously that he might experience a degree of discomfort; they who would never personally feel the pain that was about to be inflicted. — Robert Galbraith

A cynic might conclude that the real purpose of the $500 million-a-year implant business is the implantation of fat in the bellies and rumps of underemployed plastic surgeons. — Barbara Ehrenreich

Bypass surgery, angioplasty,and even diagnostic angiograms are so over used that, in my opinion, it constitutes criminal behaviour by the cardiologists and surgeons involved. Well controlled scientific studies have shown bypass surgery simply doesn't work, except to relieve severe chest pain. Those who have the surgery didn't even have a trend of longevity benefit compared to those treated without it. Yet, each year hundreds of thousands cave into the obvious fear tactics used by agressive heart doctors and submit to the bypass operation — Julian Whitaker

The tools used by the surgeons must be adapted to the task and where the human brain is concerned they cannot be too refined. — Lars Leksell

Confederate surgeons usually performed "circular" amputations. They made a 360-degree cut through the skin, then scrunched it up like a shirt cuff. After sawing through the muscle and bone, they inched the skin back down to wrap the stump. This method led to less scarring and infection. Union surgeons preferred "flap" amputations: doctors left two flaps of flesh hanging beside the wound to fold over after they'd sawed through. This method was quicker and provided a more comfortable stump for prosthetics. Altogether, surgeons lopped off 60,000 fingers, toes, hands, feet, and limbs during the war. — Sam Kean

We have achieved most as surgeons when our patients recover completely and forget us completely. All patients are immensely grateful at first after a successful operation but if the gratitude persists it usually means that they have not been cured of the underlying problem and that they fear that they may need us in the future. They feel that they must placate us, as though we were angry gods or at least the agents of an unpredictable fate. — Henry Marsh

I was thinking that surgeons had to be the happiest people on earth. To cut people up and get paid for it-that's happiness, I told myself. — Norman Mailer

Tell the image makers and magazine sellers and the plastic surgeons that you are not afraid. That what you fear the most is the death of imagination and originality and metaphor and passion. Then be bold and LOVE YOUR BODY. STOP FIXING IT. It was never broken. — Marion Woodman

[Being a good comedian] is a skill, but it's also a weird thing that only certain people can do. I always equate it to surgeons and how they can just cut people open and operate. Certain people are just wired differently, and I feel like comics are the same way. — Nick Swardson

Let me explain: There are all sorts of reasons why women pick one colorist over another. Some will go to you if you have the same kind of dog or because they like the way you look. Some will only go to a man, because they want to feel a man's hands on them. Then, of course, you have the editorial mongrels, who will go only to whoever is in this month's Elle or Allure. But no matter what brings them to you in the first place, they'll drop you cold if you're not a good colorist. Which means no mistakes. Not ever. Brain surgeons are allowed more mistakes than hair colorists. Don't misunderstand me. I'm not saying that what I do is brain surgery or in any way important. Between you and me, it's just hair. But a certain kind of woman cares about her hair. A lot. — Kathleen Flynn-Hui

Not only weight loss surgery is unnecessary but also it deprives human being a normal life. People after surgery would never be able to enjoy their food ever for the rest of their life whether it is Christmas or they are on their holidays or their child birthday or any other festival.
List of problems and complications after the weight loss surgery operation are endless as one may get additional problems such as Hernia, Internal Bleeding, Swelling of the skin around the wounds, etc. I wonder how many weight loss surgeons advice about weight loss surgery to their own family members. — Subodh Gupta

Loss is like a shrapnel wound, I said, where the piece of metal's got stuck in a place where the surgeons daren't go, so they decide to leave it. It is painful at first, horribly painful, so that you wonder you can live with it. But then the body grows around it, until it doesn't hurt anymore. Not like it used to be. But every now and again there are these twinges when you are not ready for them, and you realize it is still there, and it's always going to be there. It is a part of you. A still, hard point inside. — Robert Wilson

Other Bengalis gossiped about him and prayed their own children would not ruin their lives in the same way. And so he became what all parents feared, a blot, a failure, someone who was not contributing to the grand circle of accomplishments Bengali children were making across the country, as surgeons or attorneys or scientists, or writing articles for the front page of The New York Times. — Jhumpa Lahiri

The epithet beautiful is used by surgeons to describe operations which their patients describe as ghastly, by physicists to describe methods of measurement which leave sentimentalists cold, by lawyers to describe cases which ruin all the parties to them, and by lovers to describe the objects of their infatuation, however unattractive they may appear to the unaffected spectators. — George Bernard Shaw

Drug and medical device companies offered invitations to free dinners around town nightly. And there were over five thousand three hundred salespeople from some twelve hundred companies registered in attendance here - more than one for every two surgeons. The — Atul Gawande

There is no position so critical, no office so important, that the occasional, and even the more than occasional, utter incompetent will not wind up filling it. Heart surgeons, popes, presidents, it makes no difference. Look around and you will see an existence replete with people who are betraying, in a most egregious manner, the powers and responsibilities that have been entrusted to them. — Daniel Polansky

70,000 to 100,000 births; twins joined at the head occur only once in 2 to 2.5 million births. Siamese twins received their name because of the birthplace (Siam) of Chang and Eng (1811 - 1874) whom P.T. Barnum exhibited across America and Europe. Most cranio pagus Siamese twins die at birth or shortly afterward. So far as we know, not more than 50 attempts had previously been made to separate such twins. Of those, less than ten operations have resulted in two fully normal children. Aside from the skill of the operating surgeons, the success depends largely on how much and what kind of tissue the babies share. Occipital cranio pugus twins (such as the Binders) had never before been separated with both surviving. — Ben Carson

The tulips are too excitable; it is winter here
Look at how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed in
I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly
As light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands
I am nobody, I have nothing to do with explosions
I have given my name and my dayclothes to the nurses, and my history to the anesthetist, and my body to the surgeons — Sylvia Plath

Perhaps Court was just an ignorant Scot, but he preferred two things in his surgeons: that they be sober, and that they have lived long enough to have practiced on others before getting to him. — Kresley Cole

Dura est manus cirurgi, sed sanans. The hand of the surgeon is hard, but healing. — Walter Map

Every surgeon carries within himself a small cemetery, where from time to time he goes to pray. — Rene Leriche

No one looks at your hands to see how much they shake when you are interviewed to be a surgeon. The physical skills required are no greater than for writing cursive script. If an operation requires so much skill only a few surgeons can do it, you modify the operation to make it simpler. — Atul Gawande

He was a dying man looking down on the surgeons trying to save him. — John Green

She gave him the wide, green-eyed expression that she would have described as I will slap you so far into next week that it will take a team of surgeons just to get Wednesday out of your ass. — Christopher Moore

Though it's harder to justify the use of a cadaver for practicing nose jobs than it is for practicing coronary bypasses, it is justifiable nonetheless. Cosmetic surgery exists, for better or for worse, and it's important, for the sake of those who undergo it, that the surgeons who do it are able to do it well. — Mary Roach

To engage Muslims, we must see them as people, not merely as representatives of a foreign religion, culture, or political ideology. As people, they are products of those things, but they are also husbands and wives, children and students, truck drivers and heart surgeons. They are God's lost children too, and he has given us the task of making disciples from among them, teaching them to obey everything that he has commanded. — Georges Houssney

My final word, before I'm done, Is "Cancer can be rather fun"- Provided one confronts the tumour with a sufficient sense of humour. I know that cancer often kills, But so do cars and sleeping pills; And it can hurt till one sweats, So can bad teeth and unpaid debts. A spot of laughter, I am sure, Often accelerates one's cure; So let us patients do our bit To help the surgeons make us fit. — John B. S. Haldane

What loomed was a flayed man with his brisket tacked open like a cooling beef and his skull peeled, blue and bulbous and palely luminescent, black grots his eyeholes and bloody mouth gaped tongueless. The traveler had seized his fingers in his jaws, but it was not alone this horror that he cried. Beyond the flayed man dimly adumbrate another figure paled, for his surgeons move about the world even as you and I. — Cormac McCarthy

Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it - say, the surgeons at the military hospital where the photograph was taken - or those who could learn from it. The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be. — Sontag, Susan

So animated are these freestanding hearts that surgeons have been known to drop them. "We wash them off and they do just fine," replied New York heart transplant surgeon Mehmet Oz when I asked him about it. I imagined the heart slipping across the linoleum, the looks exchanged, the rush to retrieve it and clean it off, like a bratwurst that's rolled off the plate in a restaurant kitchen. — Mary Roach

A successful surgeon should be a man who, when asked to name the three best surgeons in the world, would have difficulty deciding on the other two. — Denton Cooley

There is a saying about surgeons, meant as a reproof: "Sometimes wrong; never in doubt." But this seemed to me their strength. Each day surgeons are faced with uncertainties. Information is inadequate; the science is ambiguous; one's knowledge and abilities are never perfect. Even with the simplest operation, it cannot be taken for granted that a patient will come through better off - or even alive. Standing at the table my first time, I wondered how the surgeon knew that he would do this patient good, that all the steps would go as planned, that the bleeding would be controlled and infection would not take hold and organs would not be injured. He didn't, of course. But still he cut. — Atul Gawande

Current / is the cure for both a stopped heart / and one that beats too much. / And if it must be shocked twice, / the surgeons call it a reluctant heart. — Robin Beth Schaer

How about a TV show about vampire plastic surgeons called, "Suck and Tuck"? — Neil Leckman

Editors are the literary surgeons of the world. — Suzanne Steele

granted equal knowledge, are there great generals as there are great surgeons, who, when the symptoms exhibited by two cases of illness are identical to the outward eye, nevertheless feel, for some infinitesimal reason, founded perhaps on their experience, but interpreted afresh, that in one case they ought to do this, in another case that; that in one case it is better to operate, in another to wait? — Marcel Proust

He though continually about the apartment building, a Pandora's Box whose thousand lids were one by one, inwardly opening. The dominant tenants of the high-rise, those who had adapted most successfully to life there, were not the unruly airline pilots and film technicians of the lower floors, nor the bad-tempered and aggressive wives of the tax specialists on the upper levels. Although at first sight these people appeared to provoke all the tension and hostility, the people really responsible were the quiet and self-contained residents, like the dental surgeons Steele and his wife. — J.G. Ballard

We priests are the surgeons of souls, and it is our duty to deliver them of shameful secrets they would fain conceal, with hands careful to neither wound no pollute. — Jules Amedee Barbey D'Aurevilly

The surgical process turned out to be slightly out of the ordinary because I was not the best patient. I was extremely worried that the doctors would cut open my palm. Cutting the palm would mean substantially altering my grip, which I really didn't want to do. I explained to both my surgeons the nuances of cricket and urged them to cut open the back of the hand. I was so obsessed with this issue that I woke up during the surgery and asked them to show me where they had made the incision. Dr Joshi later told me that they were all surprised to see me awake despite the anaesthesia. The doctors showed me that my palm had been left untouched and told me to calm down and allow them to carry on. Satisfied, I instantly drifted back to sleep. — Sachin Tendulkar

Some series teach us that ethnic features must be "fixed," by drastic means if necessary. Plastic surgeons with questionable ethics give insecure women of all ethnicities boob jobs, liposuction, and face-lifts on shows such as Extreme Makeover, The Swan, and Dr. 90210, ignoring medical risks and reinforcing problematic ideas about women's worth. Yet they don't make white surgical candidates feel like their cultural identity should also be on the chopping blocking - or that they'd be so much more attractive and fulfilled if only they didn't look so... Caucasian.

In contrast, TV docs' scalpels reduce or remove racial markers on patients of colour. Black women's noses and lips are made smaller. In an increasingly common procedure targeting Asian women, creases are added to Asian women's eyelids. — Jennifer L. Pozner

Have you seen some of the women - and the men - in Los Angeles? They pay surgeons to make them look completely different in the hope of finding their youth. But youth comes from within. If you have a young attitude, then that can show in your face, the way you walk and move. — Kim Cattrall

I really admire police officers, surgeons, or anyone who works in high stressed situations. — Yasmin Paige

People say you shouldn't have plastic surgery because if God wanted you another way he would have made you that way, but I say that's a lot of crock. If God didn't want plastic surgeons, he wouldn't have given them hands to work with. — Dolly Parton

I don't happen to approve of plastic surgery. I think God put plastic surgeons on this earth for good reasons - people get burned or people might have a nose like Pinocchio and that has to be fixed. But to just chop yourself up to look a few years younger? You could come out looking like a Picasso picture. — Iris Apfel

Someone told me - maybe it was the ugly one, unafraid to bash his own kind - that spine surgeons are weak among surgeons, that you can't really fix a back so you go in there and fuck around and bill the shit out of the insurance company and refer the patient to pain management. — Merritt Tierce

What does it take to unwind the unwanted? It takes twelve surgeons, in teams of two, rotating in and out as their medical specialty is needed. It takes nine surgical assistants and four nurses. It takes three hours. — Neal Shusterman

Here is the deeply unnerving thing: The heart, cut from the chest, keeps beating on its own. Did Poe know this when he wrote "The Tell-Tale Heart"? So animated are these freestanding hearts that surgeons have been known to drop them. "We wash them off and they do just fine, — Anonymous

The incredible new medical technology has made it possible for highly disciplined teams of surgeons ... to keep stricken organisms alive even if the brain is irretrievably damaged or lung and heart incapable of functioning without mechanical help. Now it is not dust to dust, but human to vegetable. — Marya Mannes

Growing old gracefully used to begin at about 35, but today women prefer to 'stay young gratefully' with thanks to designers, beauticians and plastic surgeons. — Edith Head

Several factors besides skill are more significant in professional writers than in most amateurs. One is love of the surface level of language: the sound of it; the taste of it on the tongue; what it can be made to do in virtuosic passages that exist only for their own sake, like cadenzas in baroque concerti. Writers in love with their tools are not unlike surgeons obsessed with their scalpels, or Arctic sled racers who sleep among their dogs even when they don't have to. — Alice Weaver Flaherty

I think often there is great rivalry between neurosurgeons and cardiac surgeons. I think I maybe have a bit of bias with neurosurgeons' opinion that nothing tops neurosurgery! But that makes for a quite interesting conflict between the two. — James Nesbitt

Brain surgeons earn 10 times that of a general practitioner ... it pays to be an expert. — Allan Pease

All heart surgeons are bastards, and Conway is no exception. — Michael Crichton

In the year 1878 I took my degree of Doctor of Medicine of the University of London, and proceeded to Netley to go through the course prescribed for surgeons in the army. Having completed my studies there, I was duly attached to the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers as Assistant Surgeon. — Arthur Conan Doyle

When you destroy midwives, you also destroy a body of knowledge that is shared by women, that can't be put together by a bunch of surgeons or a bunch of male obstetricians, because physiologically, birth doesn't happen the same way around surgeons, medically trained doctors, as it does around sympathetic women. — Ina May Gaskin

XVI. Surgeons must be very careful When they take the knife! Underneath their fine incisions Stirs the culprit, - Life! — Emily Dickinson

How many modern transsexuals are unacknowledged shamans? Perhaps it is to poets they should go for counsel, rather than surgeons. — Camille Paglia

My brother is the youngest member of the College of Physicians and Surgeons. And I wouldn't let him cut my nails. — Alan King

Could anyone among us have an inkling or a clue
What magic feats or wizardry and voodoo you can do?
And who would ever guess what powers you possess
And who would not be stunned to see you prove
There's more to us than surgeons can remove
So much more than we ever knew
So much more were we born to do
Should you draw back the curtain, this I am certain
You'll be impressed with you — Alan Jay Lerner

This isolation was key to Farber's early success. Insulated from the spotlights of public scrutiny, he worked on a small, obscure piece of the puzzle. Leukemia was an orphan disease, abandoned by internists, who had no drugs to offer for it, and by surgeons, who could not possibly operate on blood. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

A grateful world, nation and cadre of surgeons general who followed in his shadow are forever indebted to Surgeon General Koop's wisdom, fortitude, integrity and selfless service. — Richard Carmona

When I was a child, doctors sent my grandmother home in a wheelchair to die. Diagnosed with end-stage heart disease, she already had so much scar tissue from bypass operations that the surgeons had essentially run out of plumbing. There was nothing more to do, they said; her life was over at 65. — Michael Greger

Golfers, even the best golfers, tend to think simple thoughts. It is a misconception many of us have about successful people, in all fields, from the best writers to surgeons to physicists, that they are lost in complications, pondering thoughts that would stagger our minds. At times, that's probably true, but much of what successful people think about is relentlessly simple, building blocks that lead to the complex things. — Joe Posnanski

Cosmetic surgery is not "cosmetic," and human flesh is not "plastic." Even the names trivialize what it is. It's not like ironing wrinkles in fabric, or tuning up a car, or altering outmoded clothes, the current metaphors. Trivialization and infantilization pervade the surgeons' language when they speak to women: "a nip," a "tummy tuck." ... Surgery changes one forever, the mind as well as the body. If we don't start to speak of it as serious, the millennium of the man-made woman will be upon us, and we will have had no choice. — Naomi Wolf

Consider surgeons and their work. It's unthinkable to put your hands in the warm blood of another human's gut. Even with rubber gloves on. Who'd want to do that? But surgeons get over it. — Park Dietz

They told me that, as a woman, I'd never get into graduate school in physics, so they got me a job as a secretary at the College of Physicians and Surgeons and promised that, if I were a good girl, I would take courses there. — Rosalyn Sussman Yalow

Who was that fatman buried in your place? Just another imitator, plastic surgeons did his face. — Loudon Wainwright III

A lot of people have misconceptions about what the surgeon general does. — Vivek Murthy

Halsted's "cancer storehouse" grew far beyond its original walls at Hopkins. His ideas entered oncology, then permeated its vocabulary, then its psychology, its ethos, and its self-image. When radical surgery fell, an entire culture of surgery thus collapsed with it. The radical mastectomy is rarely, if ever, performed by surgeons today. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

A great deal of the American medical community's resources is geared to addressing the cosmetic needs of both women and men whom fear that by showing the deleterious effects of aging their marital relationship is in jeopardy. The most ethical plastic surgeons decline to perform impetuous work; the less ethical, but often the wealthiest professionals, perform all requested work irrespective of the long-term viability of the services rendered. The plastic surgeon's sales pitch is predictable: everyone can receive the face that he or she can afford. — Kilroy J. Oldster

They then said they would give me pork and lasses; and then inquired what execution some cannon had done, just before fired from the island, if they had not killed and wounded some of our men; and if we did not want help as our surgeons were a pack of ignormauses. I told them in reply, that they had done no other execution with their guns than wunding a dog,(which was the case,) and as they and their surgeons were of the same species of animals, I supposed the poor wunded dog would account it a particular favor to have some of his own kind ot assist him. — Joseph Plumb Martin

We have always preferred to be operated on by the assistants of famous surgeons who are also always famous medical professors, and not by those surgeons and professors themselves. — Thomas Bernhard

The only people who need degrees are dentists and brain surgeons. — David Hockney

The Stantons are surgeons. — Fiona Lowe

It is sometimes asserted that a surgical operation is or should be a work of art ... fit to rank with those of the painter or sculptor ... That proposition does not admit of discussion. It is a product of the intellectual innocence which I think we surgeons may fairly claim to possess, and which is happily not inconsistent with a quite adequate worldly wisdom. — Wilfred Trotter

The only other scenario that could explain everything, up to and including your own bizarre apperance, is a convoluted conspiracy theory involving the Russian Mafia and a crack team of plastic surgeons. — Eoin Colfer

When pain is vivid, when decisions are keen-edged,
we believe that we are the surgeons.
But time passes, and one sees the whole more clearly,
and now I perceive us as surgical instruments used by the world. — David Mitchell

Plastic surgeons are not famous for their whimsicality. If they were, we'd all have faces like Valentino's. And cocks like Lyle's. — Richard Stevenson

You can't treat an illness with cosmetic surgery, and that's why it would be great if there were qualified therapists in plastic surgeons' offices, and that people would go to a therapeutic meeting before plastic surgery. I think that should be part of the FDA requirement. — Sharon Stone

Although surgeons know how to deal with bits of the brain, they don't really know how it works. — James Nesbitt

A good surgeon doesn't just concentrate on technical ability, but also on the appropriateness of what you're doing. — Benjamin Carson

Let's not get too precious about it: actors are not heart surgeons or brain surgeons. We are just entertaining people. — Malcolm McDowell

Men sometimes seem more ready to accept women as brain surgeons than as athletes. — Janice Kaplan

If you really have to get shot, Belfast is one of the best places to do it. After twenty years of the Troubles, and after thousands of assassination attempts and punishment shootings, Belfast has trained many of the best gunshot-trauma surgeons in the world. — Adrian McKinty

A number of plastic surgeons are claiming that looking at John Kerry now, as opposed to a few months ago, they believe he's had Botox shots. They claim a number of his worry lines have vanished. They haven't vanished, just Howard Dean is wearing them now. — Jay Leno

Even worse than losing self-confidence, though, is reacting defensively. There are surgeons who will see faults everywhere except in themselves. They have no questions and no fears about their abilities. As a result, they learn nothing from their mistakes and know nothing of their limitations. As one surgeon told me, it is a rare but alarming thing to meet a surgeon without fear. "If you're not a little afraid when you operate," he said, "you're bound to do a patient a grave disservice. — Atul Gawande

People in high life are hardened to the wants and distresses of mankind as surgeons are to their bodily pains. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

Divas do it, golfers do it, pilots do it, violists do it, sprinters do it, soldiers do it, surgeons do it, astronauts do it ... only business people think it isn't necessary to train. — Tom Peters

The sick in soul insist that it is humanity that is sick, and they are the surgeons to operate on it. They want to turn the world into a sickroom. And once they get humanity strapped to the operating table, they operate on it with an ax. — Eric Hoffer

Coffee was the substance that kept us going. Our surgeons had offered us something stronger, but we were all concerned about our performance deteriorating when the stimulants wore off. — Gene Kranz