Medical Quotes, aphorisms, ideas, thoughts, criticisms and humorous sentences about doctors, medicine, good health, diseases, life and finally death, part one.
The most terrible fear that anybody should have is not war, is not a disease, not cancer or heart problems or food poisoning – it’s a man or a woman without a sense of humor.
Jonathan Winters
Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily. Every day one should meditate on being carried away by surging waves, falling from thousand-foot cliffs, dying of disease.
Yamamoto Tsunetomo
I wouldn’t recommend sex, drugs or insanity for everyone, but they’ve always worked for me.
Hunter S. Thompson
Truly great madness can not be achieved without significant intelligence.
Henrik Tikkanen
The doctor I would want for myself or for anyone else I cared about would be one who understands that disease is more than just a clinical entity; it is an experience and a metaphor, with a message that must be listened to.
Bernie Siegel
Physicians who cut, burn, stab and torture the sick and then demand a fee for it which they do not deserve to get.
Heraclitus
Dread not infanticide; the crime is imaginary: we are always mistress of what we carry in our womb, and we do no more harm in destroying this kind of matter than in evacuating another, by medicines, when we feel the need.
Marquis De Sade
Sometimes your medicine bottle has on it, ”Shake well before using.” That is what God has to do with some of His people. He has to shake them well before they are ever usable.
Vance Havner
We should be concerned not only about the health of individual patients, but also the health of our entire society.
Benjamin Carson
The books we read should be chosen with great care, that they may be, as an Egyptian king wrote over his library, ”The medicines of the soul.”
Paxton Hood
The power of community to create health is far greater than any physician, clinic or hospital.
Mark Hyman
Almost everybody is enthusiastic about the promise of biotechnology to cure disease and to relieve suffering.
Leon Kass
We ought to reverence books; to look on them as useful and mighty things. If they are good and true, whether they are about religion, politics, farming, trade, law, or medicine, they are the message of Christ, the maker of all things — the teacher of all truth.
Charles Kingsley
The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine.
Stephen B. Leacock
Although approximately 80% of osteoporosis sufferers are women, as the longevity of the male population increases, the disease will assume increasing importance in men.
Gro Harlem Brundtland
Life affords no greater responsibility, no greater privilege, than the raising of the next generation.
C. Everett Koop
The aim of medicine is to prevent disease and prolong life; the ideal of medicine is to eliminate the need of a physician.
William J. Mayo
There are only two sorts of doctors: those who practice with their brains, and those who practice with their tongues.
William Osler
In nothing do men more nearly approach the gods than in giving health to men.
Cicero
Stem cell research is the key to developing cures for degenerative conditions like Parkinson’s and motor neuron disease from which I and many others suffer. The fact that the cells may come from embryos is not an objection, because the embryos are going to die anyway.
Stephen Hawking
Good humor is the health of the soul, sadness is its poison.
Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
I have always detested any departure from reality, an attitude which I relate to my mother’s poor mental health.
Jean Piaget
The medical literature tells us that the most effective ways to reduce the risk of heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and many more problems are through healthy diet and exercise. Our bodies have evolved to move, yet we now use the energy in oil instead of muscles to do our work.
David Suzuki
Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car. You would call that not a disease but an error of judgment.
Philip K. Dick
You should read books like you take medicine, by advice, and not by advertisement.
John Ruskin
In a disordered mind, as in a disordered body, soundness of health is impossible.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
Most people, when they hear the disease name, it’s all they know about it. It sounds so mild. When I first was sick, for the first 10 years or so, I was dismissed. I was ridiculed and told I was lazy. It was a joke.
Laura Hillenbrand
I am bewitched with the rogue’s company. If the rascal have not given me medicines to make me love him, I’ll be hanged.
William Shakespeare
Common Sense is in medicine the master workman.
Peter Latham
In our own time we have seen domination spread over the social landscape to a point where it is beyond all human control. Compared to this stupendous mobilization of materials, of wealth, of human intellect, of human labor for the single goal of domination, all other recent human achievements pale to almost trivial significance. Our art, science, medicine, literature, music and ”charitable” acts seem like mere droppings from a table on which gory feasts on the spoils of conquest have engaged the attention of a system whose appetite for rule is utterly unrestrained.
Murray Bookchin
I want people to know that blood tests alone won’t always detect thyroid disease. My blood panels were normal. I think a lot more people have this disease than are diagnosed.
Kim Alexis
Death is the liberator of him whom freedom cannot release, the physician of him whom medicine cannot cure, and the comforter of him whom time cannot console.
Charles Caleb Colton
Even diseases have lost their prestige, there aren’t so many of them left. Think it over… no more syphilis, no more clap, no more typhoid… antibiotics have taken half the tragedy out of medicine.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
Osteoporosis is a disease that attacks the bones in your body. It happens to really almost everyone when they get really old. But for women, after menopause, they can lose up to 30 percent of their bone mass.
Ann Richards
Think of an economy where people could be an artist or a photographer or a writer without worrying about keeping their day job in order to have health insurance.
Nancy Pelosi
He who considers disease results to be the disease itself, and expects to do away with these as diseases, is insane. It is an insanity in medicine, an insanity that has grown out of the milder forms of mental disorder in science, crazy whims.
James Tyler Kent
As any doctor can tell you, the most crucial step toward healing is having the right diagnosis. If the disease is precisely identified, a good resolution is far more likely. Conversely, a bad diagnosis usually means a bad outcome, no matter how skilled the physician.
Andrew Weil
In a democracy dissent is an act of faith. Like medicine, the test of its value is not in its taste, but its effects.
J. William Fulbright
The practice of medicine is a thinker’s art, the practice of surgery a plumber s.
Martin H. Fisher
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
There is a duality in recognising what an incredible disease it is – in terms of its origin, that it emerges out of a normal cell. It’s a reminder of what a wonderful thing a normal cell is. In a very cold, scientific sense, I think a cancer cell is a kind of biological marvel.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.
Emile M. Cioran
I wasn’t driven into medicine by a social conscience but by rampant curiosity.
Jonathan Miller
The first duties of the physician is to educate the masses not to take medicine.
Sir William Osler
I think everyone’s experience with a terminal disease is so deeply personal and unique to the person, the context in which they’re living and the relationships that they have.
Laura Linney
A carrier with a venereal disease can have many partners, but only those whose mental and physical immune systems are weak will be susceptible to it.
Louise L. Hay
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
Placing too much emphasis on a yes/no diagnosis, meaning you either have a disease or you don’t, can lead even the most well-meaning physicians to miss underlying causes and early warning signs of illness.
Mark Hyman
Seven hundred thousand people who have dementia in this country are not heard. I’m fortunate; I can be heard. Regrettably, it’s amazing how people listen if you stand up in public and give away $1 million for research into the disease, as I have done.
Terry Pratchett
Western civilization, Christianity, decency are struggling for their very lives. In this worldwide civil war, race prejudice is our most dangerous enemy, for it is a disease at the very root of our democratic life.
Mordecai Wyatt Johnson
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
The whole LSD, STP, marijuana, heroin, hashish, prescription cough medicine crowd suffers from the ”Watchtower” itch: you gotta be with us, man, or you’re out, you’re dead. This pitch is a continual and seeming MUST with those who use the stuff. It’s no wonder they keep getting busted.
Charles Bukowski
Economics is haunted by more fallacies than any other study known to man. This is no accident. The inherent difficulties of the subject would be great enough in any case, but they are multiplied a thousandfold by a factor that is insignificant in , say, physics, mathematics, or medicine — the special pleading of selfish interests.
Henry Hazlitt
An anthill increases by accumulation. Medicine is consumed by distribution. That which is feared lessens by association. This is the thing to understand.
Siddha Nagarjuna
Flowers always make people better, happier and more helpful; they are sunshine, food and medicine to the soul.
Luther Burbank
It is a remarkable fact that smallpox, a scourge for thousands of years, has now vanished from the earth, except for two tiny vials, one locked in a highly secure facility at the Centers for Disease Control, in Atlanta, and another stored in a similarly secure vault in Siberia.
Michael Specter
Cities are the origins of global warming, impact on the environment, health, pollution, disease, finance, economies, energy are all problems that are confronted by having cities. That’s where they – all these problems come from.
Geoffrey West
Kidney disease is a low-profile, unglamorous problem, a disease that disproportionately strikes minorities and the poor. Its celebrity spokesman is blue-collar comedian George Lopez, who received a kidney from his wife.
Virginia Postrel
A faithful friend is the medicine of life.
Apocrypha
I can choose to accelerate my disease to an alcoholic death or incurable insanity, or I can choose to live within my thoroughly human condition.
Mercedes McCambridge
Heart disease continues to be the number one killer; cancer, the number 2 killer, not far behind. The tragic aspect of these deadly diseases is that they could all be cured, I do believe, if we had sufficient funding.
Arlen Specter
There is no medicine to cure hatred.
Publilius Syrus
Inflammation is the cornerstone of Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis – all of the neurodegenerative diseases are really predicated on inflammation.
David Perlmutter
There is no medicine like hope, no incentive so great, and no tonic so powerful as expectation of something tomorrow.
Orison Swett Marden
Hope, the patent medicine for disease, disaster, sin.
Wallace Rice
The miserable have no other medicine but only hope.
William Shakespeare
Given the scale of issues like global warming and epidemic disease, we shouldn’t underestimate the importance of a can-do attitude to science rather than a can’t-afford-it attitude.
Martin Rees
Hygiene is the corruption of medicine by morality. It is impossible to find a hygienist who does not debase his theory of the healthful with a theory of the virtuous. The true aim of medicine is not to make men virtuous; it is to safeguard and rescue them from the consequences of their vices.
H. L. Mencken
I think the biggest disease the world suffers from in this day and age is the disease of people feeling unloved. I know that I can give love for a minute, for half an hour, for a day, for a month, but I can give. I am very happy to do that, I want to do that.
Princess Diana
Measles and TB evolved from diseases of our cattle, influenza from a disease of pigs, and smallpox possibly from a disease of camels. The Americas had very few native domesticated animal species from which humans could acquire such diseases.
Jared Diamond
I’ve studied now Philosophy and Jurisprudence, Medicine – and even, alas! Theology –
from end to end with labor keen; and here, poor fool with all my lore I stand, no wiser than before.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
To array a man’s will against his sickness is the supreme art of medicine.
Henry Ward Beecher
I’m still not comfortable recommending that people eat saturated fat with abandon, but it’s clear to me that sugar, flour and oxidized seed oils create inflammatory effects in the body that almost certainly bear most of the responsibility for elevating heart disease risk.
Andrew Weil
Bipolar disorder is a scary disease, but it is manageable. And I feel blessed that I was able to get the right attention and the right medication to deal with my specific illness.
Eric Millegan
I confidently affirm that the greater part of those who are supposed to have died of gout, have died of the medicine rather than the disease – a statement in which I am supported by observation.
Thomas Sydenham
The Lord hath created medicines out of the earth: and he that is wise will not abhor them. Was not the water made sweet with wood, that the virtue thereof might be known? [Ecclesiasticus 38:4-5]
Bible Sacred Scriptures of Christians and Judaism
The best medicine I know for rheumatism is to thank the Lord it ain’t the gout.
Josh Billings
I’m tired of hearing sin called sickness and alcoholism a disease. It is the only disease I know of that we’re spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year to spread.
Vance Havner
Medicines are only fit for old people.
Napoleon Bonaparte
Medicine is a collection of uncertain prescriptions, the results of which, taken collectively, are more fatal than useful to mankind.
Napoleon Bonaparte
Modern medicine is a negation of health. It isn’t organized to serve human health, but only itself, as an institution. It makes more people sick than it heals.
Ivan Illich
Epilepsy is a disease in the shadows. Patients are often reluctant to admit their condition – even to close family, friends or co-workers – because there’s still a great deal of stigma and mystery surrounding the disease that plagued such historical figures as Julius Caesar, Edgar Allan Poe and Lewis Carroll.
Lynda Resnick
The whole imposing edifice of modern medicine is like the celebrated tower of Pisa –slightly off balance.
Prince Of Wales Charles
Alternative medicine plays into this exaggerated notion that you can prevent disease simply by doing the right thing.
Marcia Angell
Today’s medicine is at the end of its road. It can no longer be transformed, modified, readjusted. That’s been tried too often. Today’s medicine must DIE in order to be reborn. We must prepare its complete renovation.
Maurice Delort
Every day we do get closer to a cure. Three out of four children who are diagnosed with cancer will survive the disease, but that is not good enough. The loss of one child to this disease is too much.
Michael McCaul
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
Walking is a man’s best medicine.
Hippocrates
What medicines do not heal, the lance will; what the lance does not heal, fire will.
Hippocrates
A little rebellion now and then… is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government.
Thomas Jefferson
Cancer is a disease of the genome. And that’s what happens. You make mistakes in a cell somewhere in your body that causes it to start to grow when it should’ve stopped, and that’s cancer. And those mistakes are mistakes of DNA.
Francis Collins
Coffee is already known to be a preventive factor against mild depression, Parkinson’s disease, and colon and rectal cancers.
Chris Kilham
The biggest disease today is not leprosy or tuberculosis, but rather the feeling of being unwanted.
Mother Teresa
We 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
There are three subjects on which the knowledge of the medical profession in general is woefully weak; they are manners, morals, and medicine.
Gerald F. Lieberman
To live by medicine is to live horribly.
Carolus Linnaeus
Since the regimentation of Medicine by quacks and medical gangsters in control of the American Medical Association, this organization has become one of the most vicious rackets in the country.
Charles Lyman Loffler
Medicine heals doubts as well as diseases.
Karl Marx
Medicine is a science of uncertainty and an art of probability.
Sir William Osler
The desire to take medicine is perhaps the greatest feature which distinguishes man from animals.
Sir William Osler
Medicine is not only a science; it is also an art. It does not consist of compounding pills and plasters; it deals with the very processes of life, which must be understood before they may be guided.
Philipus A. Paracelsus
An Atheist believes that a hospital should be built instead of a church. An atheist believes that deed must be done instead of prayer said. An atheist strives for involvement in life and not escape into death. He wants disease conquered, poverty vanished, war eliminated.
Madalyn Murray O’Hair
The only medicine that does women more good than harm is dress.
Jean Paul
It is medicine, not scenery, for which a sick man must go searching.
Seneca
It is more important to know what sort of person has a disease than to know what sort of disease a person has.
Hippocrates
Living with AIDS is like always having the sword of Damocles over your head. The disease is scarier than death itself. The disease is so messy, so devastating, so pervasive. It robs you of everything you hold dear.
Larry Kramer
By medicine life may be prolonged, yet death will seize the doctor too.
William Shakespeare
Whoever grows angry amid troubles applies a drug worse than the disease and is a physician unskilled about misfortunes.
Sophocles
In medicine sins of commission are mortal, sins of omission are venial.
Theodore Tronchin
Sleep is better than medicine.
Source Unknown
The art of medicine consists of amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.
Voltaire
Money may be the husk of many things, but not the kernel. It brings you food, but not appetite; medicine, but not health; acquaintances, but not friends; servants, but not faithfulness; days of joy, but not peace and happiness.
Henrik Ibsen
AIDS today is not a death sentence. It can be treated as a chronic illness, or a chronic disease.
Yusuf Hamied
Money will buy a bed but not sleep; books but not brains; food but not appetite; finery but not beauty; a house but not a home; medicine but not health; luxuries but not culture; amusements but not happiness; religion but not salvation; a passport to everywhere but heaven.
Source Unknown
Medicine to produce health must examine disease; and music, to create harmony must investigate discord.
Plutarch
Without effective human intervention, epidemics and pandemics typically end only when the virus or bacteria has infected every available host and all have either died or become immune to the disease.
Alan Huffman
Philosophy, like medicine, has plenty of drugs, few good remedies, and hardly any specific cures.
Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort
I tended to faint when I saw accident victims in the emergency ward, during surgery, or while drawing blood. [On why he gave up medicine]
Michael Crichton
He’s the best physician that knows the worthlessness of the most medicines.
Benjamin Franklin
Doctors and nurses, with their training and their experiences, they would be able to detect unusual patterns of disease. That’s why we say it is important for every country to have a proper surveillance system. The function of the surveillance system is to detect unusual patterns of diseases.
Margaret Chan
The poets did well to conjoin music and medicine, because the office of medicine is but to tune the curious harp of man’s body.
Francis Bacon
Pride, like laudanum and other poisonous medicines, is beneficial in small, though injurious in large quantities. No man who is not pleased with himself, even in a personal sense, can please others.
Frederick Saunders
Medicine is my lawful wife and literature my mistress; when I get tired of one, I spend the night with the other.
Anton Chekhov
Psychiatric expert testimony: mendacity masquerading as medicine.
Thomas Szasz
So I can’t show you how, exactly, health care is a basic human right. But what I can argue is that no one should have to die of a disease that is treatable.
Paul Farmer
Dear doctor, you must not only let the patient tells his story, but you should also try to understand it.
Carl William Brown
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