Admissions

And yet we continue to make mistakes throughout our careers, and we always learn more from failure than from success. Success teaches us nothing, and easily makes us complacent.

The pebbles in the madmen’s pockets became more valuable than all the other pebbles in the hospital gardens simply by virtue of being owned.

To learn is to restructure your brain.

I am rather good at saying I’ll make things, and then finding I haven’t got the time, let alone getting round to make the many things I want to make or mend myself.

This discrepancy between the severity of the symptoms and the apparent triviality of the injury has been attributed to a putative ‘whiplash’ effect.

I had sunk so low that I had no future whatsoever. I had reached the bottom of a bottomless well, and there was no way up again.

Sometimes, if you are to make the right decision, you have to accept that you might be wrong.

Actual conflicts between the two halves of the brain are rare, but it is said that one patient, on losing his temper with his wife, attacked her with his right hand while his left hand tried to restrain it.

I found it ironic that despite my well-known hatred of paperwork and checklists in my own hospital, I was now trying to introduce them in the hospital in Nepal.

‘Outstanding,’ I replied, thinking of how, on my flight the previous day, the pilot had told us over the intercom when the plane was about to begin its descent that now would be an outstanding time to visit the restrooms.