When I write about medicine, I write about patients, always trying to pin down the complicated pieces of other people's lives that go spinning past m… - Perri Klass

Change can come slowly in medical practice—unless of course it comes in a sudden and absolute flurry of discovery, evidence-based recommendations, and new standards of care. But the kind of change that is based on consensus, on slowly dawning realization, or just on revamping ingrained habits can be slow indeed—it has not proved easy, for example, or even doable, to get physicians to expand our role by screening regularly and consistently for maternal depression, home firearm safety, or domestic violence.

Advice ought to be all about the patient, and that means, I know, that I shouldn't withhold good advice even in situations where I haven't been able to follow it myself. My patients are entitled to my knowledge and understanding rather than my backsliding—to my strengths, shall we say, rather than my weaknesses.

Driving down child mortality in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was in no way a single project, but it can be seen as a unified human accomplishment—maybe even our greatest human achievement, at least for pediatricians and parents.