This is how most stories end in the hospital. Not with crash carts and sirens and electric shocks to the chest, but with an empty room, a crisp white bed, silence.

~ Jacob M. Appel

Jacob M. Appel Death Death And Dying Health Health Care Hospital Hospitals Jacob M Appel Medicine Medicine Doctor Silence

To the bankrupt poet, to the jilted lover, to anyone who yearns to elude the doubt within and the din without, the tidal strait between Manhattan Island and her favorite suburb offers the specious illusion of easy death. Melville prepared for the plunge from the breakwater on the South Street promenade, Whitman at the railing of the outbound ferry, both men redeemed by some Darwinian impulse, maybe some epic vision, which enabled them to change leaden water into lyric wine. Hart Crane rejected the limpid estuary for the brackish swirl of the Caribbean Sea. In each generation, from Washington Irving’s to Truman Capote’s, countless young men of promise and talent have examined the rippling foam between the nation’s literary furnace and her literary playground, questioning whether the reams of manuscript in their Brooklyn lofts will earn them garlands in Manhattan’s salons and ballrooms, wavering between the workroom and the water. And the city had done everything in its power to assist these men, to ease their affliction and to steer them toward the most judicious of decisions. It has built them a bridge.

~ Jacob M. Appel

Jacob M. Appel Bankrupt Brooklyn Brooklyn Bridge East River Failure Herman Melville Hopelessness Jacob M Appel Manhattan Melville New York City Suicide Walt Whitman Whitman

Choose old people for enemies. They die. You win.

~ Jacob M. Appel

Jacob M. Appel Elderly Elderly People Humor Humorous Humorous Philosophy Jacob M Appel Old People Revenge Senior Citizens Winning

The most dangerous ideas are not those that challenge the status quo. The most dangerous ideas are those so embedded in the status quo, so wrapped in a cloud of inevitability, that we forget they are ideas at all.

~ Jacob M. Appel

Jacob M. Appel Dangerous Dangerous Ideas Embedded Hegemony Ideas Inevitability Jacob Appel Jacob M Appel Notion Status Quo Sublter Forms Of Communication Subtlety Subversion Subversive Undermining

Such is the demographic paradox of a junior physician's relationship with his patients: I worry about how to extend their lives. This anxiety inevitably shortens my own.

~ Jacob M. Appel

Jacob M. Appel Clinician Doctoring Hospital House Staff Intern Jacob Appel Jacob M Appel Life Life Extension Medicine Paradox Patient Physician Resident Science

Maybe that is the greatest of wonders: that we can be shaped so much by those we've known closely, and equally by those we've never known at all - and that we too can change the world long after we've left it.

~ Jacob M. Appel

Jacob M. Appel Change Grandparents Immortal Immortality Jacob Appel Jacob M Appel Life Posthumous Surpise Survivor Survivors Wonders