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Although I completed two years of internship in various small hospitals, I decided against continuing my medical training. I was much more fascinated by the unsolved problems of medicine than by practicing it.

Our great struggle in medicine these days is not just with ignorance and uncertainty. It's also with complexity: how much you have to make sure you have in your head and think about. There are a thousand ways things can go wrong.

Doctors are human; they make mistakes, and you have to stay on top of them. You have to ask the second question, the third question, the follow-up to the fourth question.

They don't like thinking in medical school. They memorize - that's all they want you to do. You must not think.

I think we learn from medicine everywhere that it is, at its heart, a human endeavor, requiring good science but also a limitless curiosity and interest in your fellow human being, and that the physician-patient relationship is key; all else follows from it.

Medicine really matured me as a person because, as a physician, you're obviously dealing with life and death issues, issues much more serious than what we're talking about in entertainment. You can't get more serious than life and death. And if you can handle that, you can handle anything.

In the history of medicine, it is not always the great scientist or the learned doctor who goes forward to discover new fields, new avenues, new ideas.

The physicians of one class feel the patients and go away, merely prescribing medicine. As they leave the room they simply ask the patient to take the medicine. They are the poorest class of physicians.

Practicing medicine is not only my vocation, it gives me an opportunity to continue to be in direct contact with people, to see them and hear their needs.

If you want to get out of medicine the fullest enjoyment, be students all your lives.