Recent events force me to re-peruse the famous medical tome The House of God.This passage makes me laugh:
“The house is special,” said the Chief. “Part of its being special is its affiliation with the BMS [Best Medical School]. I want to tell you a story about the BMS, that showed me how special the [...]
This passage is from Sarity Colonia Comes Flying by Eduardo Gonazález Viaña and found in The Peru Reader. A group of friends attempt to rid themselves of a snake that is at the command of an evil sorcerer.
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Don Guillermo’s remedy for scaring away the snake consisted of boiling heavily salted water in twenty [...]
I was just going through some old photographs with a friend here in Lima. The photos brought back many vivid memories, memories I probably wouldn’t have been able to mentally summon without the assistance of an image. The photos transported me into the past, but also emphasized how much life has changed. I was reminded [...]
Is time linear? I am 24 years old. How much of my life has passed?
Reflecting on these questions and the relative “oldness” I have felt recently, I have found the following passage — from John Berger’s little book A Fortunate Man: The story of a country doctor — useful and thought-provoking:
It is a platitude that [...]
Here are two of the most powerful quotes from Paul Farmer’s The Uses of Haiti. This book isn’t so much an academic essay as it is a simmering diatribe against the developed world’s (and, especially, the U.S.’s) treatment of Haiti. The gist of Farmer’s impassioned argument is that Haiti has been systematically used by foreign [...]
Dr. Paul Farmer. (Source.)
We should brace ourselves for the next great wave of debate, which will undoubtedly focus on what the modern world owes the destitute sick. If AIDS care becomes a right rather than a commodity, some people believe we will open a Pandora’s box. Others, including me, believe that we have no more [...]
I’d argue against your claim that humans should aim to be independent/self-reliant in all aspects of their lives . . . I don’t think true independence is a realistic ideal given all the inherent intertwinings of any society.
—Aracoun, Wikipedia extroadinaire, courtesy of The New Yorker
Teaching without zest is a crime.
—Virginia Woolf, British novelist and essayist
Another one of my favorite quotes. On an aside, here are some interesting trivials about Eisenhower (mostly courtesy of Wikipedia, so you know it’s true).
At the end of his second term in 1961, Eisenhower was the oldest President to serve, at 70 years and 98 days — a record later broken by Ronald Reagan.
Eisenhower [...]
(Note: This quote comes from one of my heroes, Nobel Prize laureate and curious character, Richard Feynman (1918-1988). I’d like to write more about him in the future.)
If a martian (who, we’ll imagine never dies except by accident) came to Earth and saw this peculiar race of creatures—these humans who live about seventy or eighty [...]