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Quotes

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

—Alexander the Great, c. 323 BC

The 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, 1605

Keep away from physicians. It is all probing and guessing and pretending with them. They leave it to nature to cure in her own time, but they take the credit. As well as very fat fees.

—Anthony Burgess, 1964

The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.

—Sigmund Freud, 1912

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

The only places where American medicine can fully live up to its possibilities are the teaching hospitals.

—Bernard De Voto, 1951

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

—John Brown, 1904

Because 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 BC

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

How many desolate creatures on the earth have learnt the simple dues of fellowship and social comfort in a hospital.

—Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1857

When 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 BC

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

—Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1860

There must be quite a few things a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many of them.

—Sylvia Plath, 1963