For many practicing pediatricians, the imperative keeps coming back to — 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."

"The safest way to transport a sick newborn, so hospital wisdom goes, is when it is still inside its mothers."

"Advice ought to be all about the patient, and that means, I know, that I shouldnt withhold good advice even in situations where I havent 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."

"When I write about medicine, I write about patients, always trying to pin down the complicated pieces of other peoples lives that go spinning past me. As a resident, exhausted beyond belief, I would come home and sit down and write the story of a surprising patient encounter, a hospital moment that I felt I would never forget. A month or two later I would look at the reference and the child would have slipped my mind completely, displaced by the parade of children and families and conversatioins and exam-room encounters and unfolding medical histories."