A miracle drug is any drug that will do what the label says it will do.
—Eric Hodgins, 1964Quotes
All pain is one malady with many names.
—Antiphanes, c. 400 BCMedication 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, 1856To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.
—Oscar Wilde, 1891Let 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, 1930The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.
—Sigmund Freud, 1912How many desolate creatures on the earth have learnt the simple dues of fellowship and social comfort in a hospital.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1857I am dying with the help of too many physicians.
—Alexander the Great, c. 323 BCWhen 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 BCHe is the best physician who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1833To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.
—Charles Lamb, 1833The 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. 600