Medicine Quotes

Medicine is not a science, it is empiricism founded on a network of blunders.

~ Emmet Densmore

Of all the remedies it has pleased almighty God to give man to relieve his suffering, none is so universal and so efficacious as opium.

~ Thomas Sydenham

Before you treat a man with a condition, know that not all cures can heal all people. For the chemistry that works on one patient may not work for the next, because even medicine has its own conditions.

~ Suzy Kassem

We live in a drug culture! Drugs are everywhere and touted as the panacea for every ailment in our society. We have drugs for hyper children, drugs for depression—some of the most insidious drugs ever—, drugs for allergies, drugs for acne, drugs for emphysema and drugs for erectile disfunction—maybe the most useful of them all. And let’s not forget the side effects of these wonder drugs! It’s cliche to even talk about drug advertisements and the laundry list of side effects tacked onto the end of them, usually rattled off at warp speed by someone on loan from the local auction house. I’ve seen ads for acne medicines that include side effects that are potentially fatal! Seriously? “Hey! Buy our Acne-Magic Drug! You’ll have crystal clear skin! In your coffin!” What the hell is wrong with us?

~ Steve Bivans

Much of the mystery surrounding drug action can be cleared up by recognizing that drugs affect only the rate at which biologic functions proceed, they do not change the basic nature of existing processes or create new functions.

~ Robert Berkow

Generally places that are comfortable with excellence don’t call themselves centers of excellence. Has anyone heard of a Princeton University Center of Excellence? Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center of Excellence?

~ Otis Webb Brawley

Critical thinking helps us to more clearly understand situations, patients, colleagues, and our agendas, negative emotions, attitudes, motivations, talents, and growing edges. This not only helps us to have a greater grasp of reality but also stops the drain of psychological energy that is necessary to be defensive or to protect our image. Because critical thinking is not natural, although we may think it is for us, it takes discipline, a willingness to face the unpleasant, and a stamina that allows one not to become unduly frustrated when we do not achieve results as quickly as we prefer with respect to our insights and growth.

~ Robert J. Wicks

Bodies are not only biological phenomena but also complex social creations onto which meanings have been variously composed and imposed according to time and space.

~ Katrina Karkazis

Think of exercise as medicine and take your daily prescription.

~ Steven Magee

Always laugh when you can, it is cheap medicine.

~ George Gordon Byron

The health benefits, both mental and physical, of humor are well documented. A good laugh can diffuse tension, relieve stress, and release endorphins into your system, which act as a natural mood elevator. In Norman Cousin's book, Anatomy of an Illness, Cousin's describes the regimen he followed to overcome a serious debilitating disease he was suffering from. It included large doses of laughter and humor. Published in 1976, his book has been widely accepted by the medical community.

~ Cherie Carter-Scott

It now appears most of us need about 5,000 units a day if we avoid the sun. The government was off by a factor of ten; an ,i>“order-of-magnitude error.”,/i> Mistakes of this scale are rare in medicine.

~ John Cannell

An infantryman’s job is to deliver his enemies into the waiting hands of Death. It is Doc’s job to protect his brothers from Death, to knock him aside and say, “Not today.

~ Adam Fenner

If my efforts have led to greater success than usual, this is due, I believe, to the fact that during my wanderings in the field of medicine, I have strayed onto paths where the gold was still lying by the wayside. It takes a little luck to be able to distinguish gold from dross, but that is all.

~ Robert Koch

When a situation feels like a matter of life and death the deep self is close at hand and it already carries inner medicine and its own life remedy.

~ Michael Meade

The poets did well to conjoin music and medicine, in Apollo, because the office of medicine is but to tune the curious harp of man's body and reduce it to harmony.

~ Francis Bacon

For where else can I go to sample daily the richness of life in all its profound chaos?

~ Theresa Brown

The art of medicine consists of amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.

~ Voltaire

Wherever the art of Medicine is loved, there is also a love of Humanity.

~ Hippocrates

We look for medicine to be an orderly field of knowledge and procedure. But it is not. It is an imperfect science, an enterprise of constantly changing knowledge, uncertain information, fallible individuals, and at the same time lives on the line. There is science in what we do, yes, but also habit, intuition, and sometimes plain old guessing. The gap between what we know and what we aim for persists. And this gap complicates everything we do.

~ Atul Gawande

Declare the past, diagnose the present, foretell the future.

~ Hippocrates

Hospitals should be arranged in such a way as to make being sick an interesting experience. One learns a great deal sometimes from being sick.

~ Alan W. Watts

Though the doctors treated him, let his blood, and gave him medications to drink, he nevertheless recovered.

~ Leo Tolstoy

It was a lie but he believed in telling lies to people. Truth telling and medicine just didn't go together except in dire emergencies, if then.

~ Mario Puzo

In 1736 I lost one of my sons, a fine boy of four years old, by the small-pox, taken in the common way. I long regretted bitterly, and still regret that I had not given it to him by inoculation. This I mention for the sake of parents who omit that operation, on the supposition that they should never forgive themselves if a child died under it; my example showing that the regret may be the same either way, and that, therefore, the safer should be chosen.

~ Benjamin Franklin

Good medicine always tastes bad.

~ Ron Hall

The patient is the one with the disease

~ Samuel Shem

Doctors are great--as long as you don't need them.

~ Edward E. Rosenbaum

Betterment is perpetual labor. The world is chaotic, disorganized, and vexing, and medicine is nowhere spared that reality. To complicate matters, we in medicine are also only human ourselves. We are distractible, weak, and given to our own concerns. Yet still, to live as a doctor is to live so that one's life is bound up in others' and in science and in the messy, complicated connection between the two It is to live a life of responsibility. The question then, is not whether one accepts the responsibility. Just by doing this work, one has. The question is, having accepted the responsibility, how one does such work well.

~ Atul Gawande

On the day I swore to uphold the Hippocratic oath, the small hairs on the back of my neck stood up as I waited for lightning to strike. Who was I, vowing calmly among all these necktied young men to steal life out of nature's jaws, every old time we got half a chance and a paycheck?... I could not accept the contract: that every child born human upon this earth comes with a guarantee of perfect health and old age clutched in its small fist.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

Failing to listen to the woman is one of the biggest mistakes a practitioner can make.

~ Helen Varney

Eunuchs do not take the gout, nor become bald.

~ Hippocrates

A BMS hears hoofbeats outside his window, the first thing he thinks of is a zebra

~ Samuel Shem

All bleeding eventually stops.

~ Jeffrey M. Goller M.d.

The standard treatments for cancer are not meant to heal, but to destroy.

~ Andreas Moritz

Gallows humor is part of having a doctor in the house. Deal with it.

~ J.r. Ward

Believing is half the cure.

~ Toba Beta

Modern allopathic medicine is the only major science stuck in the pre-Einstein era.

~ Charlotte Gerson

...by the end of my first week as an intern, I am just about ready to throw my pager out the window. A high window. Overlooking a trash compactor. Filled with highly corrosive acid.

~ Michelle Au

I welcomed my slavish existence as a surgical resident, the never-ending work, the cries that kept me in the present, the immersion in blood, pus, and tears -- the fluids in which one dissolved all traces of self. In working myself ragged, I felt integrated...

~ Abraham Verghese