Archive

Quotes

Health 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, 1621

It is not a case we are treating; it is a living, palpitating, alas, too often suffering fellow creature.

—John Brown, 1904

Let me recommend the best medicine in the world: a long journey, at a mild season, through a pleasant country, in easy stages.

—James Madison, 1794

We 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, 1969

All pain is one malady with many names.

—Antiphanes, c. 400 BC

No families take so little medicine as those of doctors, except those of apothecaries.

—Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1860

To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.

—Oscar Wilde, 1891

The best physician is he who can distinguish the possible from the impossible.

—Herophilus, c. 290 BC

He is the best physician who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope.

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1833

If 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, 1930

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

—Charles Lamb, 1833

In the name of Hippocrates doctors have invented the most exquisite form of torture ever known to man: survival.

—Luis Buñuel, 1983

A miracle drug is any drug that will do what the label says it will do.

—Eric Hodgins, 1964