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Melvin Konner Quotes

If it's working, keep doing it. If it's not working, stop doing it. If you don't know what to do, don't do anything.

If it's working, keep doing it. If it's not working, stop doing it. If you don't know what to do, don't do anything.

Melvin Konner
Simplicity, Knows, Ifs
Melvin Konner (1993). “Dear America: A Concerned Doctor Wants You to Know the Truth about Health Reform”, Addison Wesley Publishing Company

Children are born as individuals. If we fail to see that, if we see them as clay to be molded in any shape we like, the tougher ones will fight back and end up spiteful and wild, while the less strong will lose that uniqueness they were born with.

Melvin Konner
Strong, Children, Fighting

In order to be treated fairly and equally, chidren have to be treated differently.

Melvin Konner
Order, Treated

Navajo infants get so attached to cradleboard that they cry to be tied into it. Kikuyu infants in Kenya get handed around several"mothers," all wives to one man. . . . Mothers in rural Guatemala keep their infants quiet, in dark huts. Middle-class American mothers talk a blue streak at them. Israeli kibbutz mothers give them over to a communal caretaker . . . Japanese mothers sleep with them. . . . All these tactics are compatible with normal health--physical and mental--and development in infancy. So one lesson for parents so far seems to be: Let a hundred flowers bloom.

Melvin Konner
Mother, Flower, Sleep

In a cross-cultural study of 173 societies (by Herbert Barry and L. M. Paxson of the University of Pittsburgh) 76 societies typically had mother and infant sharing a bed; in 42 societies they shared a room but not a bed; and in the remaining 55 societies they shared a room with a bed unspecified. There were no societies in which infants routinely slept in a separate room.

Melvin Konner
Mother, Bed, Pittsburgh

It is almost intrinsically impossible for ideas about how we are fooling ourselves to gain an adequate hearing. We are good enough at it to keep them nicely at bay.

Melvin Konner
Ideas, Adequate, Hearing
Melvin Konner (1984). “The tangled wing: biological constraints on the human spirit”

A touching and compassionate yet completely professional account of the psychological--indeed spiritual--dimensions of the doctorDpatient relationship that make the difference between fixing and healing.

Melvin Konner
Spiritual, Healing, Differences

Intern is not just a gripping tale of becoming a doctor. It's also a courageous critique, a saga of an immigrant family living (at times a little uneasily) the American dream, and even a love story. A great read and a valuable addition to the literature—and I use the word advisedly—of medical training.

Melvin Konner
Dream, Doctors, Training

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