Medicine Quotes

Medicine, the only profession that labors incessantly to destroy the reason for its own existance.

James Bryce

What can't be cured must be endured.

Robert Burton

no disease suffered by a live man can be known, for every living person has his own peculiarities and always has his own peculiar, personal, novel, complicated disease, unknown to medicine -- not a disease of the lungs, liver, skin, heart, nerves, and so on mentioned in medical books, but a disease consisting of one of the innumerable combinations of the maladies of those organs. This simple thought could not occur to the doctors (as it cannot occur to a wizard that he is unable to work his charms) because the business of their lives was to cure, and they received money for it and had spent the best years of their lives on that business. But above all that thought was kept out of their minds by the fact that they saw they were really useful [...] Their usefulness did not depend on making the patient swallow substances for the most part harmful (the harm was scarcely perceptible because they were given in small doses) but they were useful, necessary, and indispensable because they satisfied a mental need of the invalid and those who loved her -- and that is why there are, and always will be, pseudo-healers, wise women, homoeopaths, and allopaths. They satisfied that eternal human need for hope of relief, for sympathy, and that something should be done, which is felt by those who are suffering.

Leo Tolstoy

Medicine, to produce health, has to examine disease.

Plutarch

The orthodox school has witnessed for centuries that nature itself has never once cured any existing disease with another dissimilar one, however intense. What must we think of this school, which nevertheless has continued to treat chronic diseases allopathically, with medicines and formulas that can only cause a disease condition --God knows which --dissimilar to the one being treated? Even if these physicians have not hitherto observed nature attentively enough, the miserable results of their treatment should have taught them that they were on the wrong road.

Samuel Hahnemann

God help the patient.

Lord Mansfield

A good night's sleep, or a ten-minute brawl, or a pint of chocolate ice cream, or all three together, is good medicine.

Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine

Excessive reservations and paralyzing despondency have not helped the sciences to advance nor are they helping them to advance, but a healthy optimism that cheerfully searches for new ways to understand, as it is convinced that it will be possible to find them.

Alois Alzheimer, Alzheimer

I have noticed that doctors who fail in the practice of medicine have a tendency to seek one another's company and aid in consultation.

Ernest Hemingway

The very first requirement in a hospital is that it should do the sick no harm.

Florence Nightingale

The most exquisite pleasure in the practice of medicine comes from nudging a layman in the direction of terror, then bringing him back to safety again.

Kurt Vonnegut

Medicine heals doubts as well as diseases.

Karl Marx

When a lot of remedies are suggested for a disease, that means it can't be cured.

Anton Chekhov

The only way to treat the common cold is with contempt.

William Osler

Failure to examine the throat is a glaring sin of omission, especially in children. One finger in the throat and one in the rectum makes a good diagnostician.

William Osler

A little rebellion now and then... is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government.

Thomas Jefferson

The whole imposing edifice of modern medicine is like the celebrated tower of Pisa --slightly off balance.

Prince Of Wales Charles

From year to year, it is more obvious: the goal of medicine is not health but the further extension of the health system.

Gerhard Kocher

Medicine knows no limits, especially not its own.

Gerhard Kocher

Do not forget: in medicine, there are more important things than life and death: dollars and cents.

Gerhard Kocher