A small collections of medical quotations about doctors, health, science, illness and death. An introductory page to a larger list of quotes and aphorisms on medicine.
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
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
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
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
The best doctors in the world are Doctor Diet, Doctor Quiet, and Doctor Merryman.
Jonathan Swift
Dear doctor, you must not only let the patient tells his story, but you should also try to understand it.
Carl William Brown
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
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
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 $ 20, 000 an annual dose, and which has the added virtue of not diminishing the market by actually curing anyone.
Barbara Ehrenreich
Medicine is a science of uncertainty and an art of probability.
Sir William Osler
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
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
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
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 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
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
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
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
You should read books like you take medicine, by advice, and not by advertisement.
John Ruskin
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
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
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
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
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
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