The only places where American medicine can fully live up to its possibilities are the teaching hospitals.
—Bernard De Voto, 1951Quotes
Let the young know they will never find a more interesting, more instructive book than the patient himself.
—Giorgio Baglivi, c. 1696Physician, 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. 1884He is the best physician who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1833It is not a case we are treating; it is a living, palpitating, alas, too often suffering fellow creature.
—John Brown, 1904To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.
—Charles Lamb, 1833In the name of Hippocrates doctors have invented the most exquisite form of torture ever known to man: survival.
—Luis Buñuel, 1983Health 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, 1621Keep 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, 1964There must be quite a few things a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many of them.
—Sylvia Plath, 1963Medication 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, 1856Be temperate in wine, in eating, girls, and sloth, or the Gout will seize you.
—Benjamin Franklin, 1734The best physician is he who can distinguish the possible from the impossible.
—Herophilus, c. 290 BC