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, 1794Quotes
How many desolate creatures on the earth have learnt the simple dues of fellowship and social comfort in a hospital.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1857In the name of Hippocrates doctors have invented the most exquisite form of torture ever known to man: survival.
—Luis Buñuel, 1983The physician should look upon the patient as a besieged city and try to rescue him with every means that art and science place at his command.
—Alexander of Tralles, c. 600Medication alone is not to be relied on. In one half the cases medicine is not needed, or is worse than useless. Obedience to spiritual and physical laws—hygiene of the body and hygiene of the spirit—is the surest warrant for health and happiness.
—Harriot K. Hunt, 1856The best physician is he who can distinguish the possible from the impossible.
—Herophilus, c. 290 BCWe 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, 1969There must be quite a few things a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many of them.
—Sylvia Plath, 1963Health 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, 1621The only places where American medicine can fully live up to its possibilities are the teaching hospitals.
—Bernard De Voto, 1951The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.
—Sigmund Freud, 1912It is not a case we are treating; it is a living, palpitating, alas, too often suffering fellow creature.
—John Brown, 1904Doctors don’t know everything really. They understand matter, not spirit. And you and I live in spirit.
—William Saroyan, 1943