You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.
—Gustave Flaubert, c. 1880Quotes
How many desolate creatures on the earth have learnt the simple dues of fellowship and social comfort in a hospital.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1857Health 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, 1621Be temperate in wine, in eating, girls, and sloth, or the Gout will seize you.
—Benjamin Franklin, 1734I 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, 1803We 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, 1969The best physician is he who can distinguish the possible from the impossible.
—Herophilus, c. 290 BCI am dying with the help of too many physicians.
—Alexander the Great, c. 323 BCDoctors don’t know everything really. They understand matter, not spirit. And you and I live in spirit.
—William Saroyan, 1943If 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, 1930To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.
—Charles Lamb, 1833A miracle drug is any drug that will do what the label says it will do.
—Eric Hodgins, 1964All pain is one malady with many names.
—Antiphanes, c. 400 BC