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Quotes

To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.

—Oscar Wilde, 1891

The only places where American medicine can fully live up to its possibilities are the teaching hospitals.

—Bernard De Voto, 1951

The best physician is he who can distinguish the possible from the impossible.

—Herophilus, c. 290 BC

No families take so little medicine as those of doctors, except those of apothecaries.

—Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1860

Well now, there’s a remedy for everything except death.

—Miguel de Cervantes, 1605

The 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. 600

Be temperate in wine, in eating, girls, and sloth, or the Gout will seize you.

—Benjamin Franklin, 1734

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

—Gustave Flaubert, c. 1880

It is not a case we are treating; it is a living, palpitating, alas, too often suffering fellow creature.

—John Brown, 1904

There must be quite a few things a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many of them.

—Sylvia Plath, 1963

When the physician said to him, “You have lived to be an old man,” he said, “That is because I never employed you as my physician.”

—Pausanias, c. 450 BC

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 BC

He is the best physician who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope.

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1833