University of Maryland School of Medicine - Terrae Mariae Medicus (Baltimore, MD)

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T he hospital is to me as Notre Dame to Quasimodo the hunchback. It is my egg, nest, house, country, my universe. I know its underground tunnels, its crawl spaces. Fire escape and dumbwaiter know me. I straddle the great effluent pipes that move along the ceiling of the morgue and feel the human race flow out between my legs to the sea. I crouch in the refrigerator among lumpy bags of blood ticketed for the next day’s infusions, listening to them gossip about their donors, conjecture over their recipients. Here is a building that I resemble, that looks like me. We are blood relatives. I love it — belfry, parapets, gargoyles and all. No slug who makes his shell from his own saliva, constructing his house from within himself, is more at home than I in my hospital. — Richard Selzer from Letters to a Young Doctor I ’m about to lose my mind. I haven’t been outside these walls for two days and haven’t seen daylight for two weeks. I need some real food, some real sleep, to be with people who have normal conversations. How can anyone live like this? — overheard in hallway of University of Maryland Hospital 15

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