To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.
—Oscar Wilde, 1891Quotes
Well now, there’s a remedy for everything except death.
—Miguel de Cervantes, 1605He is the best physician who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1833Medication alone is not to be relied on. In one half the cases medicine is not needed, or is worse than useless. Obedience to spiritual and physical laws—hygiene of the body and hygiene of the spirit—is the surest warrant for health and happiness.
—Harriot K. Hunt, 1856The physician should look upon the patient as a besieged city and try to rescue him with every means that art and science place at his command.
—Alexander of Tralles, c. 600Because the newer methods of treatment are good, it does not follow that the old ones were bad: for if our honorable and worshipful ancestors had not recovered from their ailments, you and I would not be here today.
—Confucius, c. 515 BCIt is not a case we are treating; it is a living, palpitating, alas, too often suffering fellow creature.
—John Brown, 1904Let the young know they will never find a more interesting, more instructive book than the patient himself.
—Giorgio Baglivi, c. 1696Health indeed is a precious thing, to recover and preserve which we undergo any misery, drink bitter potions, freely give our goods—restore a man to his health, his purse lies open to thee.
—Robert Burton, 1621You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.
—Gustave Flaubert, c. 1880There must be quite a few things a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many of them.
—Sylvia Plath, 1963All pain is one malady with many names.
—Antiphanes, c. 400 BCThe poets did well to conjoin music and medicine, because the office of medicine is but to tune the curious harp of man’s body.
—Francis Bacon, 1605