Or another character’s lecture on the descriptive names for different physical signs: “’Yes! A treasure trove of words! That’s what you find in medicine. Take the food metaphors we use to describe disease: the nutmeg liver, the sago spleen, the anchovy sauce sputum, or currant jelly stools. Why, if you consider just fruits alone you have the strawberry tongue of scarlet fever, which the next day becomes the raspberry tongue. Or how about the strawberry angioma, the watermelon stomach, the apple core lesion of cancer, the peau d’orange appearance of breast cancer...and that’s just the fruits! Don’t get me started on the nonvegetarian stuff!
My teachers were magically seeing things we students could not see; I wanted so much to be part of that magic society.
“The busy practitioner struggles with time pressures,” Dr. Verghese responded. “But hurrying through makes us just hurry through. We order a lot of tests because we think we are saving time or because we are uncertain. If you spend more time listening to a patient or being more thoughtful, you end up saving time.”
If you are interested in going into medicine (aka going through med school) or just looking for a good read, I highly recommend Final Exam (by Chen). Yes, I've recommended it before, but it's a really is a good book.
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