(Excerpts From a lecture delivered by the author at the NYU School of Medicine, May, 1997)

Audio:

"If you go back and think about medical school and about the various kinds of learning and the various kinds of education that you get in medical school, among the things you learn are a new language and a new way of telling stories, and a new way to order the experience that you hear about and that you see into a very particular, ritualized kind of narrative."

Audio:

"You learn a whole lot of different metaphors. Metaphors in medicine are very interesting and I'm not going to go into them in great detail, but I would just say that this job that we do in medicine is so strange and so alien to what most people do, that I think that sometimes we look to metaphors for ways of describing pathological change that will tie us to normal human experience. Nobody in pediatrics has trouble remembering things like "blueberry muffin baby." We look for sort of homey, familiar metaphors for strange and rare and frightening conditions."

Audio:

"One of the things that's happened with the entrance of more and more women into medicine--one of the great jumps that we made--is that we ceased to be a metaphor and became part of the medical body, the medical self."

Audio:

"Doctors live in a world full of stories, and William Carlos Williams who was the great poet of the pediatric encounter, the great poet of pediatrics, the great writer to come out of pediatrics, said this about medicine and writing: "It's no strain, in fact the one nourishes the other, even if at times I've groaned to the contrary." And that I think is true and the ways in which they nourish each other are much more interesting than the groaning. What doctors have in common with writers, over and above everything else, is, to do either of these jobs well, you have to have what would otherwise be a morbid and inappropriate curiosity about other people's lives and other people's business."

Audio and text of lecture excerpts reproduced with the permission of Perri Klass, M.D., 1997.