Richard Selzer Quotations

If I quit surgery, I'd be afraid I'd dry up.

If people understood that doctors weren't divine, perhaps the odor of malpractice might diminish.

The grist for my mill is the human body and the art of healing.

I contemplate the body, dead and diseased as well as alive and healthy.

A minor operation is one that is done on someone else

Autopsies give us the facts but not the truth.

The Country Doctor Revisited is a fine achievement. Purporting to be an overview of the practice of medicine in rural areas, it is a splendid portrait of the practice of medicine everywhere. The special conditions that prevail in the countryside as opposed to the cities are examined, and each of these is illustrated by a case history that is as compelling as it is informative. It is presented in a highly readable form that would be accessible to the general public as well as to the deliverers of health care. I recommend it most highly.

The liver, that great maroon snail: No wave of emotion sweeps it. Neither music nor mathematics gives it pause in its appointed tasks.

The heart is pure theater throbbing in its cage palpably as any nightingale.

Cutting for Stone is nothing short of masterful -a riveting tale of love, medicine, and the complex dynamic of twin brothers. It is beautifully conceived and written. The settings are wonderfully pictorial. There is no doubt in my mind that Cutting for Stone will endure in the permanent literature of our time.

And If the surgeon is like a poet, then the scars you have made on countless bodies are like verses into the fashioning of which you have poured your soul.

Each is like a river that leaves behind its name and shape, the whole course of its path , to vanish into the vast sea of God.

You do not die all at once. Some tissues live on for minutes, even hours, giving still their little cellular shrieks, molecular echoes of the agony of the whole corpus.

Thus is the fruit of the Earth taken, its flesh torn. Thus is it given over standing, toward rot. It is the principle of corruption, the death of what is, the birth of what is to be. You are wine.

The surgeon knows all the parts of the brain but he does not know his patient's dreams.

You cannot separate passion from pathology any more than you can separate a person's spirit from his body.

Surgery is the red flower that blooms among the leaves and thorns that are the rest of medicine.