Well now, there’s a remedy for everything except death.
—Miguel de Cervantes, 1605Quotes
All 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 BCTo be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.
—Charles Lamb, 1833Because 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 BCIt is not a case we are treating; it is a living, palpitating, alas, too often suffering fellow creature.
—John Brown, 1904Medication alone is not to be relied on. In one half the cases medicine is not needed, or is worse than useless. Obedience to spiritual and physical laws—hygiene of the body and hygiene of the spirit—is the surest warrant for health and happiness.
—Harriot K. Hunt, 1856When 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, 1891The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.
—Sigmund Freud, 1912We 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, 1969Doctors don’t know everything really. They understand matter, not spirit. And you and I live in spirit.
—William Saroyan, 1943You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.
—Gustave Flaubert, c. 1880