The best physician is he who can distinguish the possible from the impossible.
—Herophilus, c. 290 BCQuotes
You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.
—Gustave Flaubert, c. 1880To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.
—Oscar Wilde, 1891Because 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 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, 1969Well now, there’s a remedy for everything except death.
—Miguel de Cervantes, 1605Let the young know they will never find a more interesting, more instructive book than the patient himself.
—Giorgio Baglivi, c. 1696A miracle drug is any drug that will do what the label says it will do.
—Eric Hodgins, 1964There must be quite a few things a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many of them.
—Sylvia Plath, 1963Physician, heal yourself: thus you help your patient too. Let his best help be to see with his own eyes the man who makes himself well.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, c. 1884When 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 BCI am dying with the help of too many physicians.
—Alexander the Great, c. 323 BCKeep 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