In the name of Hippocrates doctors have invented the most exquisite form of torture ever known to man: survival.
—Luis Buñuel, 1983Quotes
To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.
—Charles Lamb, 1833If 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, 1930All pain is one malady with many names.
—Antiphanes, c. 400 BCLet the young know they will never find a more interesting, more instructive book than the patient himself.
—Giorgio Baglivi, c. 1696I am dying with the help of too many physicians.
—Alexander the Great, c. 323 BCTo get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.
—Oscar Wilde, 1891The 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, 1605The doctor occupies a seat in the front row of the stalls of the human drama, and is constantly watching and even intervening in the tragedies, comedies, and tragicomedies which form the raw material of the literary art.
—W. Russell Brain, 1952The best physician is he who can distinguish the possible from the impossible.
—Herophilus, c. 290 BCThere must be quite a few things a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many of them.
—Sylvia Plath, 1963Because 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 BCThe doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.
—Sigmund Freud, 1912