For the solution to chronic pain may lie more in what goes on around us than in what is going on inside us. - Atul Gawande

We are used to thinking of doctoring as a solitary, intellectual task. But making medicine go right is less often like making a difficult diagnosis than like making sure everyone washes their hands.

Their attitude seemed to result from incomprehension rather than cruelty, but as Tolstoy would have said, what's the difference in the end?

We’ve been wrong about what our job is in medicine. We think our job is to ensure health and survival. But really it is larger than that. It is to enable well-being.