You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.
—Gustave Flaubert, c. 1880Quotes
All pain is one malady with many names.
—Antiphanes, c. 400 BCDoctors don’t know everything really. They understand matter, not spirit. And you and I live in spirit.
—William Saroyan, 1943I 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, 1803The 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. 600In the name of Hippocrates doctors have invented the most exquisite form of torture ever known to man: survival.
—Luis Buñuel, 1983There must be quite a few things a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many of them.
—Sylvia Plath, 1963When 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 BCThe only places where American medicine can fully live up to its possibilities are the teaching hospitals.
—Bernard De Voto, 1951The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.
—Sigmund Freud, 1912We 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, 1969It is not a case we are treating; it is a living, palpitating, alas, too often suffering fellow creature.
—John Brown, 1904Let me recommend the best medicine in the world: a long journey, at a mild season, through a pleasant country, in easy stages.
—James Madison, 1794