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 BCQuotes
We 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, 1969A miracle drug is any drug that will do what the label says it will do.
—Eric Hodgins, 1964The doctor occupies a seat in the front row of the stalls of the human drama, and is constantly watching and even intervening in the tragedies, comedies, and tragicomedies which form the raw material of the literary art.
—W. Russell Brain, 1952Let the young know they will never find a more interesting, more instructive book than the patient himself.
—Giorgio Baglivi, c. 1696The only places where American medicine can fully live up to its possibilities are the teaching hospitals.
—Bernard De Voto, 1951All 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, 1943How many desolate creatures on the earth have learnt the simple dues of fellowship and social comfort in a hospital.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1857The 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, 1605The best physician is he who can distinguish the possible from the impossible.
—Herophilus, c. 290 BCI am dying with the help of too many physicians.
—Alexander the Great, c. 323 BCWell now, there’s a remedy for everything except death.
—Miguel de Cervantes, 1605