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 BCQuotes
A miracle drug is any drug that will do what the label says it will do.
—Eric Hodgins, 1964I have yet, I believe, some years in store, for I have a good state of health and a happy mind, and I take care of both by nourishing the first with temperance and the latter with abundance. This, I believe, you will allow to be the true philosophy of life.
—Thomas Paine, 1803You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.
—Gustave Flaubert, c. 1880In the name of Hippocrates doctors have invented the most exquisite form of torture ever known to man: survival.
—Luis Buñuel, 1983The 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, 1860All pain is one malady with many names.
—Antiphanes, c. 400 BCHow many desolate creatures on the earth have learnt the simple dues of fellowship and social comfort in a hospital.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1857The best physician is he who can distinguish the possible from the impossible.
—Herophilus, c. 290 BCThere must be quite a few things a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many of them.
—Sylvia Plath, 1963If 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, 1930Well now, there’s a remedy for everything except death.
—Miguel de Cervantes, 1605