Medicine Quotes

“The physician should not treat the disease but the patient who is suffering from it”
― Moses Maimonides

“There are times in my life when I have been medicine for some while poison for others. I used to think I was a victim of my story until I realized the truth; that I am the creator of my story. I choose what type of person I will be and what type of impact I will leave on others. I will never choose the destructive path of self and outward victimization again.”
― Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience

“Doctors most commonly get mixed up between absence of evidence and evidence of abense”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“I saved a man's life once," said Granny. "Special medicine, twice a day. Boiled water with a bit of berry juice in it. Told him I'd bought it from the dwarves. That's the biggest part of doct'rin, really. Most people'll get over most things if they put their minds to it, you just have to give them an interest.”
― Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites

“The most exquisite pleasure in the practice of medicine comes from nudging a layman in the direction of terror, then bringing him back to safety again.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

“When we give government the power to make medical decisions for us, we in essence accept that the state owns our bodies.”
― Ron Paul

“In 1736 I lost one of my sons, a fine boy of four years old, by the small-pox, taken in the common way. I long regretted bitterly, and still regret that I had not given it to him by inoculation. This I mention for the sake of parents who omit that operation, on the supposition that they should never forgive themselves if a child died under it; my example showing that the regret may be the same either way, and that, therefore, the safer should be chosen.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“هل كنت تظن أن الطب يقتصر على فحص المريض ، وكتابة الدواء ، والتباهي بالرداء الأبيض ؟ الطب الحقيقي أعمق من ذلك بكثير ، إنه التعامل مع الإنسان بكل ما في هذه الكلمات من المعاني والظلال”
― أيمن أسعد عبده, بوح النبضات

“The patient is the one with the disease”
― Samuel Shem, The House of God

“no disease suffered by a live man can be known, for every living person has his own peculiarities and always has his own peculiar, personal, novel, complicated disease, unknown to medicine -- not a disease of the lungs, liver, skin, heart, nerves, and so on mentioned in medical books, but a disease consisting of one of the innumerable combinations of the maladies of those organs. This simple thought could not occur to the doctors (as it cannot occur to a wizard that he is unable to work his charms) because the business of their lives was to cure, and they received money for it and had spent the best years of their lives on that business. But above all that thought was kept out of their minds by the fact that they saw they were really useful [...] Their usefulness did not depend on making the patient swallow substances for the most part harmful (the harm was scarcely perceptible because they were given in small doses) but they were useful, necessary, and indispensable because they satisfied a mental need of the invalid and those who loved her -- and that is why there are, and always will be, pseudo-healers, wise women, homoeopaths, and allopaths. They satisfied that eternal human need for hope of relief, for sympathy, and that something should be done, which is felt by those who are suffering.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“Medicine rests upon four pillars—philosophy, astronomy, alchemy, and ethics. The first pillar is the philosophical knowledge of earth and water; the second, astronomy, supplies its full understanding of that which is of fiery and airy nature; the third is an adequate explanation of the properties of all the four elements—that is to say, of the whole cosmos—and an introduction into the art of their transformations; and finally, the fourth shows the physician those virtues which must stay with him up until his death, and it should support and complete the three other pillars.”
― Paracelsus, Paracelsus: Selected Writings

“When you got a condition, it's bad to forget your medicine.”
― Frank Miller, Sin City Volume 1: The Hard Goodbye

“Death, of course, is not a failure. Death is normal. Death may be the enemy, but it is also the natural order of things.”
― Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

“At a cardiac arrest, the first procedure is to take your own pulse”
― Samuel Shem

“Despite all my public misconduct, in the past year, I had learned the Elemental spells, the Doppelschläferin, and the preparation and flying of a magic broom; I had survived two months as prisoner of war, saving the life of captain Johanne in the process; I had escaped the dungeons of Fortress Drachensbett, and after an arduous journey successfully reunited with my double, so preserving her, and all Montagne, from Prince Flonian's rapacity, I would somehow master the despicable art of being a princess.”
― Catherine Gilbert Murdock, Princess Ben

“You cannot separate passion from pathology any more than you can separate a person's spirit from his body.”
― Richard Selzer, Letters To A Young Doctor

“The spirit is one of the most neglected parts of man by doctors and scientists around the world. Yet, it is as vital to our health as the heart and mind. It's time for science to examine the many facets of the soul. The condition of our soul is usually the source of many sicknesses.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“Medicine is not a science; it is empiricism founded on a network of blunders.”
― Emmet Densmore, How Nature Cures Comprising a New System of Hygiene; Also The Natural Food of Man

“Failing to listen to the woman is one of the biggest mistakes a practitioner can make.”
― Helen Varney

“Better to forget, better to let go of the bitterness. I say bitterness is only good in medicine, or if you fry bitter gourd with egg, then it's dlicious. I told Lan-Lan many times, we have only one life, it's important to kua kwee, to look spaciously. Not keep the eyes so narrowed down to the small dispairs.
Those people who say forgive and forget, I say they not right. Not so simple. I say, find right medicine. Bitterness must be just right for problem. Then swallow it, think of good things can do when no longer sick.”
― Lydia Kwa, This Place Called Absence

“For if a man by magical arts and sacrifices will bring down the moon, and darken the sun, and induce storms, or fine weather, I should not believe that there was anything divine, but human, in these things, provided the power of the divine were overpowered by human knowledge and subjected to it.”
― Hippocrates, Hippocratic Writings

“What the sick need is teachers not treaters, health schools not hospitals, instruction not treatment, education in right living not training the sick habit. Both they and their advisors must get rid of the curing idea and the practices built up thereon.”
― Herbert M. Shelton, Getting Well

“Swords, Lances, arrows, machine guns, and even high explosives have had far less power over the fates of nations than the typhus louse, the plague flea, and the yellow-fever mosquito. Civilizations have retreated from the plasmodium of malaria, and armies have crumbled into rabbles under the onslaught of cholera spirilla, or of dysentery and typhoid bacilli. Huge areas have bee devastated by the trypanosome that travels on the wings of the tsetse fly, and generations have been harassed by the syphilis of a courtier. War and conquest and that herd existence which is an accompaniment of what we call civilization have merely set the stage for these more powerful agents of human tragedy.”
― Hans Zinsser, Rats, Lice and History

“The disease of the soul is both more common and more deadly than the disease of the body. Just as medicine is the art devoted to healing the body, so philosophy is the art devoted to healing the soul, curing it of improper emotions, false beliefs, and faulty judgments, which are the causes of so much hardship and handicap. To heal the body one turns to the practitioner of the art of healing the body, but to heal the soul there is no doctor to turn to, and each of us is left to become that doctor unto himself. Yet, this need not stop us from exhorting others to imitate us in the godly art, in the forlorn hope that they might transform themselves into better citizens for Athens and better companions for us.”
― Neel Burton, Plato: Letters to my Son

“Advances in medicine and agriculture have saved vastly more lives than have been lost in all the wars in history.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“Health is being in harmony with the world view. Health is an intuitive perception of the universe and all its inhabitants as being of one fabric. Health is maintaining communication with the animals and plants and minerals and stars. It is knowing death and life and seeing no difference. It is blending and melding, seeking solitude and seeking companionship to understand one's many levels. Unlike the more "modern" notions, in shamanic society health is not the absence of feeling; no more so is it the absence of pain. Health is seeking out all of the experiences of Creation and turning them over and over, feeling their texture and multiple meanings. Health is expanding beyond one's singular state of consciousness to experience the ripples and waves of the universe.”
― Jeanne Achterberg

“[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, Cutting for Stone

“I know you're on my side," an immunologist once remarked to me as we discussed the politics of vaccination. I did not agree with him, but only because I was uncomfortable with both sides, as I had seen them delineated. The debate over vaccination tends to be described with what the philosopher of science Donna Haraway would call "troubling dualisms." These dualisms pit science against nature, public against private, truth against imagination, self against other, thought against emotion, and man against woman.”
― Eula Biss, On Immunity: An Inoculation

“Indian Nadi System of Medicine is not much part of traditional Ayurveda, Unani, or yoga but part of a few ancient oral and family medicine traditions of India.”
― Amit Ray, 72000 Nadis and 114 Chakras in Human Body for Healing and Meditation

“Western doctors are like poor plumbers. They treat a splashing tube by cleaning up the water. These plumbers are extremely apt at drying up the water, constantly inventing new, expensive, and refined methods of drying up water. Somebody should teach them how to close the tap.”
― Denis Parsons Burkitt