Medicine Quotes

One of the first things we teach medical students is to listen to the patient by taking a careful medical history. Ninety percent of the time, you can arrive at an uncannily accurate diagnosis by paying close attention, using physical examination and sophisticated lab test to confirm your hunch (and to increase the bill to the insurance company).

~ V.s. Ramachandran

Doctors tend to enter the arenas of their profession's practice with a brisk good cheer that they have to then stop and try to mute a bit when the arena they're entering is a hospital's fifth floor, a psych ward, where brisk good cheer would amount to a kind of gloating. This is why doctors on psych wards so often wear a vaguely fake frown of puzzled concentration, if and when you see them in fifth-floor halls. And this is why a hospital M.D.--who's usually hale and pink-cheeked and poreless, and who almost always smells unusually clean and good--approaches any psych patient under this care with a professional manner somewhere between bland and deep, a distant but sincere concern that's divided evenly between the patient's subjective discomfort and the hard facts of the case.

~ David Foster Wallace

[American ambulance crews] salvaged people we'd never see in Missing, because no one would have tied to bring them to a hospital. Judging someone to be beyond help never crossed the minds of police, firemen, or doctors here.

~ Abraham Verghese

It is an odd thing that you can easily get millions of pounds for weapons to destroy life, but it is exceedingly difficult to get thousands for weapons to preserve it.

~ James Harpole

Philosophy is a bitter medicine with many fearsome side effects, but if you are able to stomach it, it can cure your soul of the many ills and infirmities of ignorance. Given the choice, most men prefer not to take it, and many of those who do soon find that they cannot carry on with it. In the end, they choose what is more pleasant over what is more wholesome, and prefer the society of those who encourage them in their follies to that of those who admonish and improve them. You, on the other hand, appear to be minded otherwise, for when a young men sets for himself the highest standards of education and conduct, he naturally shuns the company of mindless nobodies and boldly seeks out that of the singular men who are prepared to teach him and challenge him and exhort him to virtue. In time, by his strivings, he will come to realize that it is from the hardest toil and noblest deeds that the purest and most persisting pleasures are to be had, and, taking pity on other men, and thinking also of the gods, he will do everything in his power to share this precious secret.

~ Neel Burton

In more ancient times the life was simpler, but now the discovery of all these different medicines for curing dyspepsia shows that people are suffering from this disease. In this country we know that there are so many kinds of pills and medicines used. We even have those in India now. These things show that not only in America but in all the countries of the world we have to recourse to artificial means for necessary nutrients because people are not aware of right rules of diet. It is better to follow the right rules of diet in the beginning in order to avoid any kind of artificial medicines later on.

~ Virchand Gandhi

I am not sure,' Mordecai told Thomas, 'whether omens can be trusted.''Of course they can.''I should like to hear your reasons. But show me your urine first.''You said I was cured,' Thomas protested. 'Eternal vigilance, dear Thomas, is the price of health. Piss for me.

~ Bernard Cornwell

..I don't count Jennifer among my mistakes. She had a severe infection and precious little reserve. Nevertheless, I think of her often. Those minutes of terror and confusion I felt standing powerless in her room served as a visceral reminder throughout my training... that the big picture isn't enough in medicine...

~ Lisa Sanders

Before the counter-culture revolutionary Li Lian was executed in 1971 for criticising the Cultural Revolution, pour policemen pushed her face against the window of a truck, lifted her shirt and cut out her kidneys with a surgical knife,’ Mau Sen said, his face stony and white. ‘I think that removing the organs of convicts while they are still alive is too much. It completely contravenes medical ethics.’ ‘This is a dissection class, not a political meeting,’ Sun Chunlin said.

~ Ma Jian

I'm sorry, 'herbal medicine', Oh, herbal medicine's been around for thousands of years! Indeed it has, and then we tested it all, and the stuff that worked became 'medicine'. And the rest of it is just a nice bowl of soup and some potpourri, so knock yourselves out.

~ Dara Ó Briain

The striking thing is that WHO doesn't really have the authority to do any of this. It can't tell governments what to do. It hires no vaccinators, distributes no vaccine. It is a small Geneva bureaucracy run by several hundred international delegates whose annual votes tell the organization what to do but not how to do it.…The only substantial resource that WHO has cultivated is information and expertise.

~ Atul Gawande

Nature heals under the auspices of the medical profession.

~ Haven Emerson

The biggest disease today is not leprosy or tuberculosis but rather the feeling of being unwanted.

~ Mother Teresa

Doctors are busy playing God when so few of us have the qualifications. And besides the job is taken.

~ Bernie S. Siegel

Don't defy the diagnosis try to defy the verdict.

~ Norman Cousins

Nothing is more essential in the treatment of serious disease than the liberation of the patient from panic and forboding.

~ Norman Cousins

Sickness is felt but health not at all.

~ Thomas Fuller

The placebo cures 30% of patients - no matter what they have.

~ David Kline

To cure sometimes to relieve often to comfort always.

~ Anonymous

Vasectomy means not ever having to say you're sorry.

~ Larry Adler

What some call health if purchased by perpetual anxiety about diet isn't much better than tedious disease.

~ George Dennison Prentice

It is much more important to know what sort of a patient has a disease than what sort of a disease a patient has.

~ William Osier

The desire to take medicine is perhaps the greatest feature which distinguishes man from animals.

~ William Osier

The doctor if he forgets he is only the assistant to nature and zealously takes over the stage may so add to what nature is already doing well that he actually throws the patient into shock by the vigour he adds to nature's forces.

~ Herbert Ratner

God heals and the doctor takes the fees.

~ Benjamin Franklin

The history of medicine is a story of amazing foolishness and amazing intelligence.

~ Jerome Tarshis

If men could get pregnant abortion would be a sacrament.

~ Florynce Kennedy

Abortion is advocated only by persons who have themselves been born.

~ Ronald Reagan

Man should not strive to eliminate his complexes but to get in accord with them they are legitimately what directs his contact in the world.

~ Sigmund Freud

The body never lies.

~ Martha Graham

All that is really necessary for survival of the fittest it seems is an interest in life good bad or peculiar.

~ Grace Paley

The only thing to know is how to use your neurosis.

~ Arthur Adamov

Common sense is in medicine the master workman.

~ Peter Latham

The prime goal is to alleviate suffering and not to prolong life. And if your treatment does not alleviate suffering but only prolongs life that treatment should be stopped.

~ Christian Barnard

As long as men are liable to die and are desirous to live a physician will be made fun of but he will be well paid.

~ Jean De La Bruyère

After dinner rest a while after supper walk a mile.

~ Arabic Proverb

Imprisoned in every fat man a thin one is wildly signalling to be let out.

~ Cyril Connolly

Wherever a doctor cannot do good he must be kept from doing harm.

~ Hippocrates

The student is to collect and evaluate facts. The facts are locked up in the patient.

~ Abraham Flexner

The practice of medicine is a thinker's art the practice of surgery a plumber's.

~ Martin H. Fisher