Fifty-six units a week as the safe upper limit for male alcohol consumption

Back in 1982 both the Royal College of Psychiatrists and the British Medical Journal’s ABC of alcohol were giving fifty-six units a week as the safe upper limit for male alcohol consumption. Yet, five years later, this limit was reduced to twenty-one units a week, without any reasons for the change being given and without there being any substantive new research to back it up.

A. Barr, Drink: a social history (1995), 321

Hema felt she'd tricked time; with her twentieth-century knowledge she had travelled back to an earlier epoch

Yes, it might be the era of the kidney transplant in America and a vaccine for polio due to arrive even in India, but here [Ethiopia] Hema felt she'd tricked time; with her twentieth-century knowledge she had travelled back to an earlier epoch. The power filtered down from His Majesty to the Rases, the Dejazmaches, and the letter nobility, and then to the vassals and the peons. Her skills were so rare, so needed for the poorest of the poor, and even at times in the royal palace, that she felt valued. Wasn't that the definition of home? Not where you are from, but where you are wanted?

A. Verghese, Cutting for stone (2009), 79  

But when medicine inures you to the idea of life, to survival, then it has failed utterly

To me, these were miracles enough. It is an old complaint about the practice of medicine that it inures you to the idea of death. But when medicine inures you to the idea of life, to survival, then it has failed utterly. The novelist Thomas Wolfe, recalling a lifelong struggle with illness, wrote in his last letter, “I’ve made a long voyage and been to a strange country, and I’ve seen the dark man very close.” I had not made the journey myself, and I had only seen the darkness reflected in the eyes of others. But surely, it was the most sublime moment of my clinical life to have watched that voyage in reverse, to encounter men and women returning from the strange country—to see them so very close, clambering back. 

S. Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies (2010), 400

I asked the doctor to take my fingers off; he refused

My hand was a ghastly sight; two of the fingers were hanging by a piece of skin, all the palm was shot away and most of the wrist. For the first time, and certainly the last, I had been wearing a wrist-watch, and it had been blown into the remains of the wrist. I asked the doctor to take my fingers off; he refused, so I pulled them off myself and felt absolutely no pain in doing it.

A.C. de Wiart, Happy Odyssey (1950), 64