"This book is a compensatory pause. The 'abnormal beat' was a medical education that took place at the wrong time - in my mid-thirties, after I had settled in to another, promising career and also into a marriage and a family. It was as if the electrical stability of my life, the normal rhythm of the soul, was temporarily disrupted; there was a need to gather one's forces for the next normal beat." Pg 5

"And the medical student crossing them for the first time must pretend to the same confidence, ignoring the force and weight of all the previous years of obscure but strict training with regard to personal space. I certainly did try to pretend, and my task was greatly complicated by the fact that I was doing my very first physical examination on a woman who promptly aroused in me unmistakable if fleeting feelings of romantic...