Read the book a few weeks ago. Some relavent quotes:
I saw a young man who had been admitted in poor shape with high fever, and the drugs prescribed had been tetracycline and paracetamol. Later a visiting doctor diagnosed probable malaria and substituted chloroquine. Could not someone have looked at a blood film? . Such systematic approaches are alien to the ethos of the home. Mother Teresa prefers providence to planning; her rules are designed to prevent any drift towards materialism
(On why needles were being reused without sterilization) The decision not to do so, and indeed to run instead a haphazard and cranky institution which would expose itself to litigation and protest were it run by any branch of the medical profession, is a deliberate one. The point is not the honest relief of suffering but the promulgation of a cult based on death and suffering and subjection
She described a person who was in the last agony last agonies of cancer and suffering unbearable pain. With a smile, Mother Teresa told the camera what she told this terminal patient: “You are suffering like Christ on the cross. So Jesus must be kissing you.” Unconscious of the account to which this irony might be charged, she then told of the sufferer’s reply: “Then please tell him to stop kissing me.
The poor were the ones who suffered from the sisters’ self-righteous adherence to “poverty.” ...immense quantities of money, donated in all sincerity by people “from all walks of life,” which lingered unproductively in bank accounts, the size of which even many of the sisters knew nothing about. The sisters were rarely allowed to spend money on the poor they were trying to help. Instead they were forced to plead poverty, thus manipulating generous, credulous people and enterprises into giving more goods, services and cash
(Shortly after the Bhopal Tragedy) At the airport, greeted by throngs of angry relatives of the victims, she was pressed to give her advice and counsel, and she did so unhesitatingly “Forgive,” she said. “Forgive, forgive.”
Mother Teresa’s emphasis on “the poorest of the poor and the lowest of the low” has served to reinforce the impression of Calcutta as a city of dreadful night, an impression which justly irritates many Bengalis. The pleasant surprise that awaits the visitor to Calcutta is this: it is poor and crowded and dirty, in ways which are hard to exaggerate, but it is anything but abject. Its people are neither inert nor cringing. They work and they struggle.