It is not a case we are treating; it is a living, palpitating, alas, too often suffering fellow creature.
—John Brown, 1904Quotes
Because 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 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, 1605We have to ask ourselves whether medicine is to remain a humanitarian and respected profession or a new but depersonalized science in the service of prolonging life rather than diminishing human suffering.
—Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, 1969The best physician is he who can distinguish the possible from the impossible.
—Herophilus, c. 290 BCThe doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.
—Sigmund Freud, 1912Health 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, 1621Let me recommend the best medicine in the world: a long journey, at a mild season, through a pleasant country, in easy stages.
—James Madison, 1794Keep away from physicians. It is all probing and guessing and pretending with them. They leave it to nature to cure in her own time, but they take the credit. As well as very fat fees.
—Anthony Burgess, 1964Let the young know they will never find a more interesting, more instructive book than the patient himself.
—Giorgio Baglivi, c. 1696I have yet, I believe, some years in store, for I have a good state of health and a happy mind, and I take care of both by nourishing the first with temperance and the latter with abundance. This, I believe, you will allow to be the true philosophy of life.
—Thomas Paine, 1803Doctors don’t know everything really. They understand matter, not spirit. And you and I live in spirit.
—William Saroyan, 1943You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.
—Gustave Flaubert, c. 1880