The 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, 1605Quotes
Doctors don’t know everything really. They understand matter, not spirit. And you and I live in spirit.
—William Saroyan, 1943It is not a case we are treating; it is a living, palpitating, alas, too often suffering fellow creature.
—John Brown, 1904Medication 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, 1856I am dying with the help of too many physicians.
—Alexander the Great, c. 323 BCAll pain is one malady with many names.
—Antiphanes, c. 400 BCThe doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.
—Sigmund Freud, 1912How many desolate creatures on the earth have learnt the simple dues of fellowship and social comfort in a hospital.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1857Be temperate in wine, in eating, girls, and sloth, or the Gout will seize you.
—Benjamin Franklin, 1734You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.
—Gustave Flaubert, c. 1880A miracle drug is any drug that will do what the label says it will do.
—Eric Hodgins, 1964The only places where American medicine can fully live up to its possibilities are the teaching hospitals.
—Bernard De Voto, 1951No families take so little medicine as those of doctors, except those of apothecaries.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1860