Menu

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Alice Dreger Quotes

When all is said and done, science actually takes hard work and a willingness to sometimes find out that your most cherished hypothesis is wrong.

– Alice Dreger

I do work half time as a historian of medicine at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, and I started my career with work in the 19th century.

– Alice Dreger

Doctors are human animals. They want to be loved, they are tribal, they instinctually favor stories over scientific evidence, they make mistakes, and even small gifts make them susceptible to being biased. If we took doctors seriously as human animals, we might hurt them – and they might hurt us – a lot less.

– Alice Dreger

Using medicine in the service of cosmesis is generally bad for patients, bad for doctors, and bad for democracy. The only exceptions are when we know the intervention will actually reduce suffering, as with a primary cleft lip repair.

– Alice Dreger

You can’t go into new life experiences without the understanding that yeah, you may fail, but knowing you might fail can’t stop you from trying.

– Alice Dreger

After I dropped out of college at the age of 19, I became a mortgage broker, and when I went back to school I thought about going into real estate law. I probably would have made a lot more money and died of boredom by now.

– Alice Dreger

I don’t have the panic I used to have, meeting people who are androgynous, but when you meet someone whose identity is unclear, that throws your own identity into flux because the way we treat each other is very gendered.

– Alice Dreger

As a kid, I did some running but especially loved biking and swimming. I grew up on Long Island, and our mom took us all the time to the ocean, so I grew up doing open-water swimming in the Atlantic.

– Alice Dreger

My mother has told so many times the unbelievable story of how, as a toddler, I would demand raw onions and eat them like apples, I think that, at this juncture, it is a story that just has to be believed.

– Alice Dreger

After I dropped out of college at the age of 19, I became a mortgage broker, and when I went back to school I thought about going into real estate law.

– Alice Dreger

Want to be a well-paid bioethicist, with one, two, or even three university appointments? Just get yourself a two-piece navy polyester suit and follow these three simple rules: (1) Never name names. (2) Screw principles; just follow procedures. (3) Bury the money.

– Alice Dreger

I don’t know what has caused this reawakening in academia. Obama? The GOP’s assaults on science and on patients? Jon Stewart? I’m not at all sure. I just know I don’t feel nearly as alone in academia as I used to. I’m feeling increasingly surrounded by fellow Ph.D.’s and by M.D.’s who seem to be taking a lot of things personally.

– Alice Dreger

Doctors are human animals. They want to be loved, they are tribal, they instinctually favor stories over scientific evidence, they make mistakes, and even small gifts make them susceptible to being biased.

– Alice Dreger

So many times I’ve heard people say that the right to marry for gay and lesbian couples won’t really change anything other than some legal and financial stuff. It’s a dumb argument: those legal and financial effects matter.

– Alice Dreger

A hospital may spend several million dollars separating a pair of conjoined twins even though that separation is likely to leave them worse off.

– Alice Dreger

Fact-checking doesn’t exist primarily because some of us are liars and cheats. It exists because writers will be writers, much as they may mean to be historians.

– Alice Dreger

You know what Oprah taught me? Unless you count as changing your life having a neighborhood dad say to you every morning at the school bus stop, ‘You sure don’t look as good as you did on ‘Oprah!’, being on ‘Oprah’ doesn’t change your life.

– Alice Dreger

Being a parent of a boy who wants to wear sparkles and grow his hair long – especially when you don’t know where it’s all going to go – it’s hard stuff. I’m not being politically incorrect in acknowledging that, am I?

– Alice Dreger

If we are going to have to worry all the time that we might offend some students’ sensibilities, we are not going to be able to teach in a way that actually matters. We’re not going to be able to teach about sex, gender, race, religion, or violence.

– Alice Dreger

According to my mother, there pretty much wasn’t anything I wouldn’t eat as a child. Not just try, but eat. I was even inclined to dig into stuff about which she expressed open disgust – lobster and other shellfish, and cheap Chinese food with pepper so hot it made your gums feel like a medieval dentist had been at them.

– Alice Dreger

I actually completely suck at being a bioethicist. What I do is history of medicine and patient advocacy. Patient advocacy is actually the opposite of bioethics, because bioethicists are the people who increasingly set up and justify the systems we patient advocates have to fight.

– Alice Dreger

I could make a martyrly claim to having been the victim of childhood enslavement when I report that I started regularly cooking with my mother at a hot stove when I was five. But the truth is I wanted to cook. Cooking meant being near food.

– Alice Dreger

Perhaps it is because I’m a writer trained in history that I’ve always assumed I would make mistakes in my drafts. Historians know how faulty human memory can be.

– Alice Dreger

A democratic medical establishment does not alter people’s bodies to fit regressive social norms; it advocates for patients by demanding the social body get its act together.

– Alice Dreger

What we should care about is health – reduction of morbidity and mortality. Too often, we instead pay attention to whether something is ‘normal.’ A hospital may spend several million dollars separating a pair of conjoined twins, even though that separation is likely to leave them worse off.

– Alice Dreger

Ironically, when I’ve asked my straight friends to join me in hanging a rainbow flag, they answer, ‘But someone might think we’re gay,’ not realizing that is exactly the point. To be mistaken for the oppressed is to momentarily become the oppressed.

– Alice Dreger