Quotes
Quotes From Famous People About Medicine
Whenever a doctor cannot do good, he must be kept from doing harm.
Hippocrates
The mind controls so much of the body. We are much more than flesh and blood; we are complex systems. Patients do better when they have faith that they're going to do better. That's why I always tell my patients and their families not to neglect their prayers. There's nobody I don't say that to.
Ben Carson
I am dying from the treatment of too many physicians.
Alexander the Great
We should be concerned not only about the health of individual patients, but also the health of our entire society.
Ben Carson
When I told my doctor I couldn't afford an operation, he offered to touch-up my X-rays.
Henny Youngman
Keep a watch also on the faults of the patients, which often make them lie about the taking of things prescribed.
Hippocrates
I told the doctor I broke my leg in two places. He told me to quit going to those places.
Henny Youngman
Getting out of the hospital is a lot like resigning from a book club. You're not out of it until the computer says you're out of it.
Erma Bombeck
Never go to a doctor whose office plants have died.
Erma Bombeck
Medicine is my lawful wife and literature my mistress; when I get tired of one, I spend the night with the other.
Anton Chekhov
A physician is not angry at the intemperance of a mad patient, nor does he take it ill to be railed at by a man in fever. Just so should a wise man treat all mankind, as a physician does his patient, and look upon them only as sick and extravagant.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca
Walking is man's best medicine.
Hippocrates
Doctors will have more lives to answer for in the next world than even we generals.
Napoleon Bonaparte
It is in moments of illness that we are compelled to recognize that we live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom, whole worlds apart, who has no knowledge of us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body.
Marcel Proust
A hospital bed is a parked taxi with the meter running.
Groucho Marx
It is reasonable to expect the doctor to recognize that science may not have all the answers to problems of health and healing.
Norman Cousins
The human body experiences a powerful gravitational pull in the direction of hope. That is why the patient's hopes are the physician's secret weapon. They are the hidden ingredients in any prescription.
Norman Cousins
To study the phenomena of disease without books is to sail an uncharted sea, while to study books without patients is not to go to sea at all.
William Osler
Medicine sometimes snatches away health, sometimes gives it.
Ovid
Three-quarters of the sicknesses of intelligent people come from their intelligence. They need at least a doctor who can understand this sickness.
Marcel Proust
People are so afraid of authority figures and doctors are authority figures.
Martha Beck
The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.
Voltaire
The best doctor is the one you run to and can't find.
Denis Diderot
To array a man's will against his sickness is the supreme art of medicine.
Henry Ward Beecher
Disease is an experience of a so-called mortal mind. It is fear made manifest on the body.
Mary Baker Eddy
The physicians of one class feel the patients and go away, merely prescribing medicine. As they leave the room they simply ask the patient to take the medicine. They are the poorest class of physicians.
Ramakrishna
The art of medicine was to be properly learned only from its practice and its exercise.
Thomas Sydenham
Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge, we make promise only; pain we obey.
Marcel Proust
The good physician treats the disease; the great physician treats the patient who has the disease.
William Osler
Nature can do more than physicians.
Oliver Cromwell
Thinking of disease constantly will intensify it. Feel always 'I am healthily in body and mind'.
Swami Sivananda
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 Osler
In the name of Hypocrites, doctors have invented the most exquisite form of torture ever known to man: survival.
Edward Everett Hale
Time is generally the best doctor.
Ovid
Prescription: A physician's guess at what will best prolong the situation with least harm to the patient.
Ambrose Bierce
See also