No families take so little medicine as those of doctors, except those of apothecaries.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1860Quotes
The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.
—Sigmund Freud, 1912I am dying with the help of too many physicians.
—Alexander the Great, c. 323 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, 1605Keep 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, 1964The best physician is he who can distinguish the possible from the impossible.
—Herophilus, c. 290 BCA miracle drug is any drug that will do what the label says it will do.
—Eric Hodgins, 1964Let the young know they will never find a more interesting, more instructive book than the patient himself.
—Giorgio Baglivi, c. 1696Medication 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, 1856You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.
—Gustave Flaubert, c. 1880We 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, 1969Well now, there’s a remedy for everything except death.
—Miguel de Cervantes, 1605Be temperate in wine, in eating, girls, and sloth, or the Gout will seize you.
—Benjamin Franklin, 1734