Everything teeters between pathos and bathos: here you are, violating society's most fundamental taboos and yet formaldehyde is a powerful appetite stimulant, so you also crave a burrito.

Still, when you work in a hospital, the papers you file aren't just papers: they are fragments of narratives filled with risks & triumphs.

I still had a lot of practical medicine to learn, but would knowledge alone be enough, with life and death hanging in the balance? Surely intelligence wasn't enough; moral clarity was needed as well. Somehow, I had to believe, I would gain not only knowledge but wisdom, too.

Literature provided the best account of the life of the mind, while neuroscience laid down the most elegant rules of the brain.

Before operating on a patient’s brain, I realized, I must first understand his mind: his identity, his values, what makes his life worth living, and what devastation makes it reasonable to let that life end. The cost of my dedication to succeed was high, and the ineluctable failures brought me nearly unbearable guilt. Those burdens are what make medicine holy and wholly impossible: in taking up on another’s cross, one must sometimes get crushed by the weight.

It was only in practising medicine that I could pursue a serious biological philosophy. Moral speculation was puny compare to moral action.

I thought back to med school, when a patient had told me that she always wore her most expensive socks to the doctor’s office, so that when she was in a patient’s gown and shoeless, the doctor would see the socks and know she was a person of substance, to be treated with respect.

Words began to feel as weightless as the breath that carried. Stepping back, I realized that I was merely confirming what I already knew: I wanted that direct experience. It was only in practicing medicine that I could pursue a serious biological philosophy. Moral speculation was puny compared to moral action.