It is not a case we are treating; it is a living, palpitating, alas, too often suffering fellow creature.
—John Brown, 1904Quotes
All pain is one malady with many names.
—Antiphanes, c. 400 BCThe 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 doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.
—Sigmund Freud, 1912He is the best physician who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1833I 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, 1803The 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, 1605Let the young know they will never find a more interesting, more instructive book than the patient himself.
—Giorgio Baglivi, c. 1696To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.
—Charles Lamb, 1833No families take so little medicine as those of doctors, except those of apothecaries.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1860The best physician is he who can distinguish the possible from the impossible.
—Herophilus, c. 290 BCLet me recommend the best medicine in the world: a long journey, at a mild season, through a pleasant country, in easy stages.
—James Madison, 1794If 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