The 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, 1605Quotes
To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.
—Charles Lamb, 1833There must be quite a few things a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many of them.
—Sylvia Plath, 1963Let the young know they will never find a more interesting, more instructive book than the patient himself.
—Giorgio Baglivi, c. 1696He is the best physician who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1833The best physician is he who can distinguish the possible from the impossible.
—Herophilus, c. 290 BCThe doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.
—Sigmund Freud, 1912Be temperate in wine, in eating, girls, and sloth, or the Gout will seize you.
—Benjamin Franklin, 1734It 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, 1860If 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, 1930Keep 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, 1964The only places where American medicine can fully live up to its possibilities are the teaching hospitals.
—Bernard De Voto, 1951