No families take so little medicine as those of doctors, except those of apothecaries.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1860Quotes
The only places where American medicine can fully live up to its possibilities are the teaching hospitals.
—Bernard De Voto, 1951We 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, 1969There 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 BCA miracle drug is any drug that will do what the label says it will do.
—Eric Hodgins, 1964If a patient is poor, he is committed to a public hospital as “psychotic”; if he can afford the luxury of a private sanitarium, he is put there with the diagnosis of “neurasthenia”; if he is wealthy enough to be isolated in his own home under constant watch of nurses and physicians, he is simply an indisposed “eccentric.”
—Pierre Marie Janet, 1930The 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, 1605I 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, 1803In the name of Hippocrates doctors have invented the most exquisite form of torture ever known to man: survival.
—Luis Buñuel, 1983The best physician is he who can distinguish the possible from the impossible.
—Herophilus, c. 290 BCPhysician, heal yourself: thus you help your patient too. Let his best help be to see with his own eyes the man who makes himself well.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, c. 1884The doctor occupies a seat in the front row of the stalls of the human drama, and is constantly watching and even intervening in the tragedies, comedies, and tragicomedies which form the raw material of the literary art.
—W. Russell Brain, 1952