To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.
—Charles Lamb, 1833Quotes
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, 1969It is not a case we are treating; it is a living, palpitating, alas, too often suffering fellow creature.
—John Brown, 1904The 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, 1605No families take so little medicine as those of doctors, except those of apothecaries.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1860A miracle drug is any drug that will do what the label says it will do.
—Eric Hodgins, 1964When 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, 1833If 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, 1930Keep 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, 1964How many desolate creatures on the earth have learnt the simple dues of fellowship and social comfort in a hospital.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1857Let the young know they will never find a more interesting, more instructive book than the patient himself.
—Giorgio Baglivi, c. 1696Be temperate in wine, in eating, girls, and sloth, or the Gout will seize you.
—Benjamin Franklin, 1734