Quotes on medicine, aphorisms, ideas, thoughts, criticisms and humorous wits on doctors, medicine, drugs, health, illness, diseases and the medical art therapy
A vigorous five mile walk will do more good for an unhappy, but otherwise healthy adult than all the medicine and psychology in the world.
Paul Dudley White
I hold it that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical. It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government.
Thomas Jefferson
None of the mortals will ever spend their life completely free from pain, each one always pays his price for life.
Aeschylus
It’s hard enough to work and raise a family when your kids are all healthy and relatively normal, but when you add on some kind of disability or disease, it can just be such a burden.
Patricia Heaton
In selling as in medicine, prescription before diagnosis is malpractice.
Tony Alesandra
Nobody dast blame this man. For a salesman, there is no rock bottom to the life. He don’t put a bolt to a nut, he don’t tell you the law or give you medicine. He’s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back – that’s an earthquake. And then you get yourself a couple of spots on your hat, and you’re finished. Nobody dast blame this man. A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.
Arthur Miller
Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each. Let them be your only diet drink and botanical medicines.
Henry David Thoreau
Lost wealth may be replaced by industry, lost knowledge by study, lost health by temperance or medicine, but lost time is gone forever.
Samuel Smiles
As there is a use in medicine for poisons, so the world cannot move without rogues.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
One does nothing who tries to console a despondent person with word. A friend is one who aids with deeds at a critical time when deeds are called for.
Titus Maccius Plautus
Both the Moral Majority, who are recycling medieval language to explain AIDS, and those ultra-leftists who attribute AIDS to some sort of conspiracy, have a clearly political analysis of the epidemic. But even if one attributes its cause to a microorganism rather than the wrath of God, or the workings of the CIA, it is clear that the way in which AIDS has been perceived, conceptualized, imagined, researched and financed makes this the most political of diseases.
Dennis Altman
From the point of view of the pharmaceutical industry, the AIDS problem has already been solved. After all, we already have a drug which can be sold at the incredible price of $8, 000 an annual dose, and which has the added virtue of not diminishing the market by actually curing anyone.
Barbara Ehrenreich
It could be said that the AIDS pandemic is a classic own-goal scored by the human race against itself.
Princess Anne Ireland Princess Royal Of Great Britain
I have learned more about love, selflessness and human understanding in this great adventure in the world of AIDS than I ever did in the cut-throat, competitive world in which I spent my life.
Anthony Perkins
AIDS occupies such a large part in our awareness because of what it has been taken to represent. It seems the very model of all the catastrophes privileged populations feel await them.
Susan Sontag
AIDS obliges people to think of sex as having, possibly, the direst consequences: suicide. Or murder.
Susan Sontag
Fear is a disease that eats away at logic and makes man inhuman.
Marian Anderson
Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge, we make promises only; pain we obey.
Marcel Proust
The moral immune system of this country has been weakened and attacked, and the AIDS virus is the perfect metaphor for it. The malignant neglect of the last twelve years has led to breakdown of our country’s immune system, environmentally, culturally, politically, spiritually and physically.
Barbara Streisand
The AIDS epidemic has rolled back a big rotting log and revealed all the squirming life underneath it, since it involves, all at once, the main themes of our existence: sex, death, power, money, love, hate, disease and panic. No American phenomenon has been so compelling since the Vietnam War.
Edmund White
Electronic aids, particularly domestic computers, will help the inner migration, the opting out of reality. Reality is no longer going to be the stuff out there, but the stuff inside your head. It’s going to be commercial and nasty at the same time.
J. G. Ballard
Everyone detected with AIDS should be tattooed in the upper forearm, to protect common needle users, and on the buttock, to prevent the victimization of other homosexuals.
William F. Buckley
The smallest effort is not lost. Each wavelet on the ocean tost aids in the ebb-tide or the flow; each rain-drop makes some floweret blow; each struggle lessens human woe.
Charles Mackay
There rise her timeless capitals of empires daily born, whose plinths are laid at midnight and whose streets are packed at morn; and here come tired youths and maids that feign to love or sin in tones like rusty razor blades to tunes like smitten tin.
Rudyard Kipling
One of the best hearing aids a man can have is an attentive wife.
Groucho Marx
It is hard to overstate how valuable it is to have all the incredible tools that are used for human disease to study plants.
Bill Gates
Literature is being taught as though it were only political medicine or political poison–a view that is not only illiberal but illiterate.
Louis Menand
Prostitution is the supreme triumph of capitalism. Worst of all, prostitution reinforces all the old dumb clichés about women’s sexuality; that they are not built to enjoy sex and are little more than walking masturbation aids, things to be DONE TO, things so sensually null and void that they have to be paid to indulge in fornication, that women can be had, bought, as often as not sold from one man to another. When the sex war is won prostitutes should be shot as collaborators for their terrible betrayal of all women, for the moral tarring and feathering they give indigenous women who have had the bad luck to live in what they make their humping ground.
Julie Burchill
Old maids sweeten their tea with scandal.
Josh Billings
Simplicity of life, even the barest, is not a misery, but the very foundation of refinement; a sanded floor and whitewashed walls and the green trees, and flowery meads, and living waters outside; or a grimy palace amid the same with a regiment of housemaids always working to smear the dirt together so that it may be unnoticed; which, think you, is the most refined, the most fit for a gentleman of those two dwellings?
William Morris
In the name of Hypocrites, doctors have invented the most exquisite form of torture ever known to man: survival.
Luis Bunuel
I trust that a graduate student some day will write a doctoral essay on the influence of the Munich analogy on the subsequent history of the twentieth century. Perhaps in the end he will conclude that the multitude of errors committed in the name of ”Munich” may exceed the original error of 1938.
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
An alcoholic has been lightly defined as a man who drinks more than his own doctor.
Alvan L. Barach
A doctor can bury his mistakes, but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.
Frank Lloyd Wright
Myself when young did eagerly frequent doctor and saint, and heard great argument about it and about: but evermore came out by the same door as in I went.
Omar Khayyam
Master and Doctor are my titles; for ten years now, without repose, I held my erudite recitals and led my pupils by the nose.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
If I had my way books would not be written in English, but in an exceedingly difficult secret language that only skilled professional readers and story-tellers could interpret. Then people like you would have to go to public halls and pay good prices to hear the professionals decode and read the books aloud for you. This plan would have the advantage of scaring off all amateur authors, retired politicians, country doctors and I-Married-a-Midget writers who would not have the patience to learn the secret language.
Robertson Davies
While the doctors consult, the patient dies.
English Proverb Sayings of British Origin
The race of prophets is extinct. Europe is becoming set in its ways, slowly embalming itself beneath the wrappings of its borders, its factories, its law-courts and its universities. The frozen Mind cracks between the mineral staves which close upon it. The fault lies with your moldy systems, your logic of 2 + 2 = 4. The fault lies with you, Chancellors, caught in the net of syllogisms. You manufacture engineers, magistrates, doctors, who know nothing of the true mysteries of the body or the cosmic laws of existence. False scholars blind outside this world, philosophers who pretend to reconstruct the mind. The least act of spontaneous creation is a more complex and revealing world than any metaphysics.
Antonin Artaud
Towns are full of people, houses full of tenants, hotels full of guests, trains full of travelers, cafés full of customers, parks full of promenaders, consulting-rooms of famous doctors full of patients, theatres full of spectators, and beaches full of bathers. What previously was, in general, no problem, now begins to be an everyday one, namely, to find room.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
Die, my dear doctor! That’s the last thing I shall do!
Lord Palmerston
If your time ain’t come not even a doctor can kill you.
American Proverb Sayings of American Origin
A doctor, like anyone else who has to deal with human beings, each of them unique, cannot be a scientist; he is either, like the surgeon, a craftsman, or, like the physician and the psychologist, an artist. This means that in order to be a good doctor a man must also have a good character, that is to say, whatever weaknesses and foibles he may have, he must love his fellow human beings in the concrete and desire their good before his own.
W. H. Auden
When a man goes through six years training to be a doctor he will never be the same. He knows too much.
Enid Bagnold
One of the fundamental reasons why so many doctors become cynical and disillusioned is precisely because, when the abstract idealism has worn thin, they are uncertain about the value of the actual lives of the patients they are treating. This is not because they are callous or personally inhuman: it is because they live in and accept a society which is incapable of knowing what a human life is worth.
John Berger
The belief that the world is getting worse, that we can’t solve extreme poverty and disease, isn’t just mistaken. It is harmful.
Bill Gates
Never go to a doctor whose office plants have died.
Erma Bombeck
For the poison of hatred seated near the heart doubles the burden for the one who suffers the disease; he is burdened with his own sorrow, and groans on seeing another’s happiness.
Aeschylus
Doctors will have more lives to answer for in the next world than even we generals.
Napoleon Bonaparte
In an ideal world, the amount of money we spend on medical research to prevent or cure a disease would be proportional to its seriousness and the number of people who suffer from it.
Peter Singer
Doctors are just the same as lawyers; the only difference is that lawyers merely rob you, whereas doctors rob you and kill you too.
Anton Chekhov
I asked [my doctors] if I’d be able to play singles tennis and they said I could. That made me very happy since I haven’t played in five years.
Walter Cronkite
The best doctor is the one you run to and can’t find.
Denis Diderot
I saw many people who had advanced heart disease and I was so frustrated because I knew if they just knew how to do the right thing, simple lifestyle and diet steps, that the entire trajectory of their life and health would have been different.
Mehmet Oz
When a doctor does go wrong he is the first of criminals. He has nerve and he has knowledge.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The more ignorant, reckless and thoughtless a doctor is, the higher his reputation soars even amongst powerful princes.
Desiderius Erasmus
God heals and the doctor takes the fee.
Benjamin Franklin
The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.
Sigmund Freud
The doctor found, when she was dead, her last disorder mortal.
Oliver Goldsmith
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. A doctor who cannot take out your appendix properly will recommend you to a doctor who will be unable to remove your tonsils with success.
Ernest Hemingway
The disease of an evil conscience is beyond the practice of all the physicians of all the countries in the would.
William E. Gladstone
Whenever a doctor cannot do good, he must be kept from doing harm.
Hippocrates Ancient Greek Physician
It is the duty of a doctor to prolong life and it is not his duty to prolong the act of dying.
Thomas Horder
I suppose one has a greater sense of intellectual degradation after an interview with a doctor than from any human experience.
Alice James
My doctor gave me six months to live but when I couldn’t pay the bill, he gave me six months more.
Walter Matthau
Time is generally the best doctor.
Ovid
HIV AIDS is a disease with stigma. And we have learned with experience, not just with HIV AIDS but with other diseases, countries for many reasons are sometimes hesitant to admit they have a problem.
Margaret Chan
For each illness that doctors cure with medicine, they provoke ten in healthy people by inoculating them with the virus that is a thousand times more powerful than any microbe: the idea that one is ill.
Marcel Proust
The superior doctor prevents sickness; The mediocre doctor attends to impending sickness; The inferior doctor treats actual sickness;
Chinese Proverb
If the doctor cures, the sun sees it; if he kills, the earth hides it.
Scottish Proverb
Doctors don’t know everything really. They understand matter, not spirit. And you and I live in spirit.
William Saroyan
Every doctor will allow a colleague to decimate a whole countryside sooner than violate the bond of professional etiquette by giving him away.
George Bernard Shaw
The doctor learns that if he gets ahead of the superstitions of his patients he is a ruined man; and the result is that he instinctively takes care not to get ahead of them.
George Bernard Shaw
The best doctors in the world are Doctor Diet, Doctor Quiet, and Doctor Merryman.
Jonathan Swift
He has been a doctor a year now and has had two patients, no, three, I think — yes, it was three; I attended their funerals.
Mark Twain
What some call health, if purchased by perpetual anxiety about diet, isn’t much better than tedious disease.
Alexander Pope
A patient going to a doctor for his first visit was asked, ”And whom did you consult before coming to me?” ”Only the village druggist,” was the answer. ”And what sort of foolish advice did that numbskull give you?” asked the doctor, his tone and manner denoting his contempt for the advice of the layman. ”Oh,” replied his patient, with no malice aforethought, ”he told me to come and see you.”
Source Unknown
The doctor knows what his trained eyes see — and he says it’s the last of the ninth for me. So one more thing while the clouds loom dark and then I must leave this noisy park.
Source Unknown
Doctors are men who prescribe medicines of which they know little, to cure diseases of which they know less, in human beings of whom they know nothing.
Voltaire
I know of nothing more laughable than a doctor who does not die of old age.
Voltaire
The majority of the diseases which the human family have been and still are suffering under, they have created by ignorance of their own organic health, and work perseveringly to tear themselves to pieces, and when broken down and debilitated in body and mind, send for the doctor and drug themselves to death.
Ellen Gould White
No company is preferable to bad. We are more apt to catch the vices of others than virtues, as disease is far more contagious than health.
Charles Caleb Colton
After listening to a lecture on evolution by a science professor, a student wrote a poem and titled it ”The Amazing Professor.” The poem read: Once I was a tadpole when I began to begin. Then I was a frog with my tail tucked in. Next I was a monkey on a coconut tree. Now I am a doctor with a Ph.D.
Source Unknown
I told my doctor I get very tired when I go on a diet, so he gave me pep pills. Know what happened? I ate faster.
Joe E. Lewis
These can never be true friends: Hope, dice, a prostitute, a robber, a cheat, a goldsmith, a monkey, a doctor, a distiller.
Indian Proverb
Before he left, Aunt William pressed a sovereign into his hand guiltily, as if it were conscience money. He, on his side, took it as though it were a doctor’s fee, and both ignored the transaction.
Ada Leverson
Evil comes at leisure like the disease. Good comes in a hurry like the doctor.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
I don’t know what it’s like for a book writer or a doctor or a teacher as they work to get established in their jobs. But for a singer, you’ve got to continue to grow or else you’re just like last night’s cornbread, stale and dry.
Loretta Lynn
Some people think that doctors and nurses can put scrambled eggs back into the shell.
Dorothy Canfield Fisher
Joy, temperance, and repose, slam the door on the doctor’s nose.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The conscience of the world is so guilty that it always assumes that people who investigate heresies must be heretics; just as if a doctor who studies leprosy must be a leper. Indeed, it is only recently that science has been allowed to study anything without reproach.
Aleister Crowley
Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge we make promise only; pain we obey.
Marcel Proust
We like security: we like the pope to be infallible in matters of faith, and grave doctors to be so in moral questions so that we can feel reassured.
Blaise Pascal
The patient is not likely to recover who makes the doctor his heir.
Thomas Fuller
My doctor told me to stop having intimate dinners for four unless there are three other people.
Orson Welles
A lot of people say to me, ”Why did you kill Christ?” ”I dunno… it was one of those parties, got out of hand, you know.” ”We killed him because he didn’t want to become a doctor, that’s why we killed him.”
Lenny Bruce
The judges of normality are present everywhere. We are in the society of the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the ”social worker” -judge.
Michel Foucault
Love: Before I heard the doctors tell The dangers of a kiss; I had considered kissing you. The nearest thing to bliss. But now I know biology and sit and sigh and moan; six million mad bacteria and I thought we were alone!
Source Unknown
How are you?
General state of health fairly satisfactory. Slight insomnia and a rather bad corn on left foot. Blood pressure low, digestion slow but normal.
George Mikes
Chemotherapy and radiotherapy will make the ancient method of drilling holes in a patient’s head to permit the escape of demons look relatively advanced. Toxic chemotherapy is a hoax. The doctors who use it are guilty of pre-meditated murder, and the use of cobalt and other methods of cancer treatment popular today effectively closes the door on cure.
Jr., Ernst T. Krebs
Injections are the best thing ever invented for feeding doctors.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
By medicine life may be prolonged, yet death will seize the doctor too.
William Shakespeare
She saw she had fallen into the hands of one of those doctors who have strayed too far from apparent in the direction of the soul.
Rebecca West
That’s metaphysics, my dear fellow. It’s forbidden me by my doctor, my stomach won’t take it.
Boris Pasternak
Neurosis has an absolute genius for malingering. There is no illness which it cannot counterfeit perfectly. If it is capable of deceiving the doctor, how should it fail to deceive the patient?
Marcel Proust
Oh, for boyhood’s painless play, sleep that wakes in laughing day, health that mocks the doctor’s rules, knowledge never learned of schools.
John Greenleaf Whittier
The south produced statesmen and soldiers, planters and doctors and lawyers and poets, but certainly no engineers and mechanics. Let Yankees adopt such low callings. [Gone With The Wind]
Margaret Mitchell
Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?
Source Unknown
A recent survey was said to prove that the people we Americans most admire are our politicians and doctors. I don’t believe it. They are simply the people we are most afraid of. And with the most reason.
Source Unknown
What it comes down to is this: the grocer, the butcher, the baker, the merchant, the landlord, the druggist, the liquor dealer, the policeman, the doctor, the city father and the politician — these are the people who make money out of prostitution, these are the real reapers of the wages of sin.
Polly Adler
It is almost impossible to be a doctor and an honest man, but it is obscenely impossible to be a psychiatrist without at the same time bearing the stamp of the most incontestable madness: that of being unable to resist that old atavistic reflex of the mass of humanity, which makes any man of science who is absorbed by this mass a kind of natural and inborn enemy of all genius.
Antonin Artaud
Research is subordinated (not to a long-term social benefit) but to an immediate commercial profit. Currently, disease (not health) is one of the major sources of profit for the pharmaceutical industry, and the doctors are willing agents of those profits.Walter Modell
He’s a fool that makes his doctor his heir.
Benjamin Franklin
Dietary fat, whether saturated or not, is not a cause of obesity, heart disease or any other chronic disease of civilization.
Andrew Weil
The doctor sees all the weakness of mankind; the lawyer all the wickedness, the theologian all the stupidity.
Arthur Schopenhauer
A gifted teacher is as rare as a gifted doctor, and makes far less money.
Source Unknown
I am like a doctor. I have written a prescription to help the patient. If the patient doesn’t want all the pills I’ve recommended, that’s up to him. But I must warn that next time I will have to come as a surgeon with a knife.
Javier Perez De Cuellar
No girl who is going to marry need bother to win a college degree; she just naturally becomes a ”Master of Arts” and a ”Doctor of Philosophy” after catering to an ordinary man for a few years.
Helen Rowland
Men worry over the great number of diseases, while doctors worry over the scarcity of effective remedies.
Pien Ch’Iao
If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I’d type a little faster.
Isaac Asimov
A doctor, a lawyer and a mathematician were discussing the relative merits of having a wife or a mistress. The lawyer says: “For sure a mistress is better. If you have a wife and want a divorce, it causes all sorts of legal problems. The doctor says: “It’s better to have a wife because the sense of security lowers your stress and is good for your health. The mathematician says: ” You’re both wrong. It’s best to have both so that when the wife thinks you’re with the mistress and the mistress thinks you’re with your wife — you can do some mathematics.
A Joke
A doctor, an architect, and a computer scientist were arguing about whose profession was the oldest. In the course of their arguments, they got all the way back to the Garden of Eden, whereupon the doctor said, “The medical profession is clearly the oldest, because Eve was made from Adam’s rib, as the story goes, and that was a simply incredible surgical feat.” The architect did not agree. He said, “But if you look at the Garden itself, in the beginning there was chaos and void, and out of that, the Garden and the world were created. So God must have been an architect.” The computer scientist, who had listened to all of this said, “Yes, but where do you think the chaos came from?”
Another Joke
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