He is the best physician who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1833Quotes
Physician, 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. 1884There 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 BCLet the young know they will never find a more interesting, more instructive book than the patient himself.
—Giorgio Baglivi, c. 1696It is not a case we are treating; it is a living, palpitating, alas, too often suffering fellow creature.
—John Brown, 1904No families take so little medicine as those of doctors, except those of apothecaries.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1860A miracle drug is any drug that will do what the label says it will do.
—Eric Hodgins, 1964All pain is one malady with many names.
—Antiphanes, c. 400 BCBecause 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 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, 1969