I have been pulling a lot of quotes, recently, from Andrew Solomon’s Far From the Tree. The book is wonderful, although too long. It could have used a more aggressive editor. Nevertheless, it is chock full of great stories and great ideas. Here is a Solomon quote I feel compelled to share, which captures how…
Freedom to be insane is an illusory freedom, a cruel hoax perpetrated on those who cannot think clearly by those who will not think clearly. -E. Fuller Torrey (Click here to view comments)
In an article from the Atlantic last January, Joshua Lang wrote a wonderful article about the challenge of deciding whether surgical anesthesia actually makes people unconscious, or whether people remember parts of their surgery and are traumatized by them later. In the article, he quotes George Wilson, a Scottish chemist who had his foot amputated…