In the name of Hippocrates doctors have invented the most exquisite form of torture ever known to man: survival.
—Luis Buñuel, 1983Quotes
To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.
—Oscar Wilde, 1891There must be quite a few things a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many of them.
—Sylvia Plath, 1963Let me recommend the best medicine in the world: a long journey, at a mild season, through a pleasant country, in easy stages.
—James Madison, 1794Let the young know they will never find a more interesting, more instructive book than the patient himself.
—Giorgio Baglivi, c. 1696The only places where American medicine can fully live up to its possibilities are the teaching hospitals.
—Bernard De Voto, 1951It is not a case we are treating; it is a living, palpitating, alas, too often suffering fellow creature.
—John Brown, 1904When 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 BCNo families take so little medicine as those of doctors, except those of apothecaries.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1860You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.
—Gustave Flaubert, c. 1880Keep 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, 1964The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.
—Sigmund Freud, 1912He is the best physician who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1833