The only places where American medicine can fully live up to its possibilities are the teaching hospitals.
—Bernard De Voto, 1951Quotes
Well now, there’s a remedy for everything except death.
—Miguel de Cervantes, 1605To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.
—Oscar Wilde, 1891I 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, 1803Let 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, 1930You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.
—Gustave Flaubert, c. 1880All pain is one malady with many names.
—Antiphanes, c. 400 BCLet 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, 1964The 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. 600Health 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, 1621There must be quite a few things a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many of them.
—Sylvia Plath, 1963