Things that are making me happy on Monday January 2, 2012

1) Bon Iver Pandora station. Pretty much all I need for my nights as of late.

2) Reading medical ethics again and appreciating the field a lot more the second time around:

“When a patient enters a hospital, one of the first things that commonly happens to him is that he loses his personal identity. He is generally referred to, not as Henry Jones, but as ‘that case of mitral stenosis in the second bed on the left.’ […] Henry happens to have heart disease, but he is not disturbed so much by dyspnea as he is by anxiety for the future, and a talk with an understanding physician who tries to make the situation clear to him, and then gets the social service worker to find a suitable occupation, does more to straighten him out than a book full of drugs and diets. Henry has an excellent example of a certain type of heart disease, and he is glad that all the staff find him interesting, for it makes him feel that they will do the best they can to cure him; but just because he is an interesting case he does not cease to be a human being with very human hopes and fears.”

-Francis W. Peabody, M.D. (1927)