In the name of Hippocrates doctors have invented the most exquisite form of torture ever known to man: survival.
—Luis Buñuel, 1983Quotes
A miracle drug is any drug that will do what the label says it will do.
—Eric Hodgins, 1964Physician, 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. 1884To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.
—Charles Lamb, 1833The 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, 1605How many desolate creatures on the earth have learnt the simple dues of fellowship and social comfort in a hospital.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1857If a patient is poor, he is committed to a public hospital as “psychotic”; if he can afford the luxury of a private sanitarium, he is put there with the diagnosis of “neurasthenia”; if he is wealthy enough to be isolated in his own home under constant watch of nurses and physicians, he is simply an indisposed “eccentric.”
—Pierre Marie Janet, 1930The best physician is he who can distinguish the possible from the impossible.
—Herophilus, c. 290 BCBe temperate in wine, in eating, girls, and sloth, or the Gout will seize you.
—Benjamin Franklin, 1734Let me recommend the best medicine in the world: a long journey, at a mild season, through a pleasant country, in easy stages.
—James Madison, 1794There must be quite a few things a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many of them.
—Sylvia Plath, 1963It 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, 1860