How many desolate creatures on the earth have learnt the simple dues of fellowship and social comfort in a hospital.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1857Quotes
The 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. 600It is not a case we are treating; it is a living, palpitating, alas, too often suffering fellow creature.
—John Brown, 1904There must be quite a few things a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many of them.
—Sylvia Plath, 1963The best physician is he who can distinguish the possible from the impossible.
—Herophilus, c. 290 BCNo families take so little medicine as those of doctors, except those of apothecaries.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1860Let the young know they will never find a more interesting, more instructive book than the patient himself.
—Giorgio Baglivi, c. 1696Well now, there’s a remedy for everything except death.
—Miguel de Cervantes, 1605I am dying with the help of too many physicians.
—Alexander the Great, c. 323 BCTo get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.
—Oscar Wilde, 1891We 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, 1969Keep 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, 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, 1803