In the name of Hippocrates doctors have invented the most exquisite form of torture ever known to man: survival.
—Luis Buñuel, 1983Quotes
Keep away from physicians. It is all probing and guessing and pretending with them. They leave it to nature to cure in her own time, but they take the credit. As well as very fat fees.
—Anthony Burgess, 1964No families take so little medicine as those of doctors, except those of apothecaries.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1860The best physician is he who can distinguish the possible from the impossible.
—Herophilus, c. 290 BCPhysician, 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. 1884When 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 BCTo get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.
—Oscar Wilde, 1891I 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 doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.
—Sigmund Freud, 1912Let the young know they will never find a more interesting, more instructive book than the patient himself.
—Giorgio Baglivi, c. 1696All pain is one malady with many names.
—Antiphanes, c. 400 BCI am dying with the help of too many physicians.
—Alexander the Great, c. 323 BCThe 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, 1952