How many desolate creatures on the earth have learnt the simple dues of fellowship and social comfort in a hospital.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1857Quotes
To 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, 1605Let me recommend the best medicine in the world: a long journey, at a mild season, through a pleasant country, in easy stages.
—James Madison, 1794I am dying with the help of too many physicians.
—Alexander the Great, c. 323 BCWe 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, 1969In the name of Hippocrates doctors have invented the most exquisite form of torture ever known to man: survival.
—Luis Buñuel, 1983You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.
—Gustave Flaubert, c. 1880Health indeed is a precious thing, to recover and preserve which we undergo any misery, drink bitter potions, freely give our goods—restore a man to his health, his purse lies open to thee.
—Robert Burton, 1621All pain is one malady with many names.
—Antiphanes, c. 400 BCWell now, there’s a remedy for everything except death.
—Miguel de Cervantes, 1605Because 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 BCA miracle drug is any drug that will do what the label says it will do.
—Eric Hodgins, 1964