Selected medicine quotes

1. The only person who is a worse liar than a faith healer is his patient.

2. This new form of activity medicine I could not represent to myself as talking about the religion of love, but only as an actual putting it into practice.

3. The fetus, in many cases, dies just as a human adult or child would: It bleeds to death as it is torn from limb from limb. The fetus can be alive at the beginning of the dismemberment process and can survive for a time while its limbs are being torn off.

4. Advances in medicine and agriculture have saved vastly more lives than have been lost in all the wars in history.

5. We live in a time when the words impossible and unsolvable are no longer part of the scientific community's vocabulary. Each day we move closer to trials that will not just minimize the symptoms of disease and injury but eliminate them.

6. The choice is not between drugs and no drugs, but between illegal drugs and legal drugs. Until the 1920s drugs were legal, why not now? Lots of people are on drugs anyway - it is called medication.

7. It may seem a strange principle to enunciate as the very first requirement in a hospital that it should do the sick no harm.

8. Optimistic lies have such immense therapeutic value that a doctor who cannot tell them convincingly has mistaken his profession.

9. Cancer research is a growth industry.

10. A desperate disease requires a dangerous remedy.

11. People who don't know how to keep themselves healthy ought to have the decency to get themselves buried, and not waste time about it.

12. Exercise is bunk. If you are healthy, you don't need it: if you are sick you should not take it.

13. A transfer of money should never be involved in this profound situation. Although illness is profound, too, but medicine's a business today. It's a business.

14. As a medical doctor, it is my duty to evaluate the situation with as much data as I can gather and as much expertise as I have and as much experience as I have to determine whether or not the wish of the patient is medically justified.

15. After enough concussions the head injuries blur together.

16. Physicians are the cobblers, rather the botchers, of men's bodies; as the one patches our tattered clothes, so the other solders our diseased flesh.

17. I'm afraid my gut level reaction is basically, proceed is cute, but cute doesn't cut it in the emergency room.

18. It is when physicians are bogged down by their incomplete technologies, by the innumerable things they are obliged to do in medicine when they lack a clear understanding of disease mechanisms, that the deficiencies of the health-care system are most conspicuous. If I were a policy-maker, interested in saving money for health care over the long haul, I would regard it as an act of high prudence to give high priority to a lot more basic research in biologic science.

19. We may, I believe, anticipate that the chemist of the future who is interested in the structure of proteins, nucleic acids, polysaccharides, and other complex substances with high molecular weight will come to rely upon a new structural chemistry, involving precise geometrical relationships among the atoms in the molecules and the rigorous application of the new structural principles, and that great progress will be made, through this technique, in the attack, by chemical methods, on the problems of biology and medicine.

20. A symbol from the first, of mastery, experiments such as Hippocrates made and substituted for vague speculation stayed the ravages of plague.

21. Cured yesterday of my disease, I died last night of my physician.

22. I don't intend for this to take on a political tone. I'm just here for the drugs.

23. Medicine sometimes snatches away health, sometimes gives it.

24. But tell me, this physician of whom you were just speaking, is he a moneymaker, an earner of fees, or a healer of the sick?

25. Again, truth should be highly valued; if, as we were saying, a lie is useless to the gods, and useful only as a medicine to men, then the use of such medicines should be restricted to physicians; private individuals have no business with them.

26. An apothecary should never be out of spirits.

27. Just because no one has ever gotten better from Spasmodic Dysphonia before doesn't mean I can't be the first.

28. People have said, 'You've turned your back on pediatrics.' I said, 'No. It took me until I was in my 60s to realize that politics was a part of pediatrics.'

29. Instead of wishing to see more doctors made by women joining what there are, I wish to see as few doctors, either male or female, as possible. For, mark you, the women have made no improvement - they have only tried to be men and they have only succeeded in being third-rate men.

30. We went through the records and we found over five hundred of his patients who were alive and well five years after their treatment, with no cancer. And Dr. Burton didn't selectively give us these. These were 'take what you want. Here are the patients I treated.' So there was statistical improvement -- more so than any cancer institution in the United States could show.

31. But today in the United States, and this shows you where fascism REALLY exists, ANY doctor in the United States who cures cancer using alternative methods will be destroyed. You cannot name me a doctor doing well with cancer using alternative therapies that is not under attack. And I KNOW these people; I've interviewed them.

32. My father once discovered that one cannot 'walk off' gangrene.

33. Venereal: From Venus, the goddess of love, this word refers to the reality of desire. With the rise of Protestantism and science, the word 'disease' was tacked on in a revealing combination of categorization and moralizing. 'Which disease?' 'The disease of love.'

34. Our body is a machine for living. It is organized for that, it is its nature. Let life go on in it unhindered and let it defend itself, it will do more than if you paralyze it by encumbering it with remedies.

35. A hospital is no place to be sick.

36. I can cure the gout or stone in some, sooner than Divinity, Pride, or Avarice in others.

37. I think that sick people in Ankh-Morpork generally go to a vet. It's generally a better bet. There's more pressure on a vet to get it right. People say 'it was god's will' when granny dies, but they get angry when they lose a cow.

38. 'Exuberant health is always, as such, sickness also.'

39. The best doctor is the one you run for and can't find.

40. A typical triumph of modern science to find the only part of Randolph that was not malignant and remove it.' Diary entry (March 1964), after hearing that doctors had removed a benign tumor from Randolph Churchill.

41. I use the word nursing for want of a better. It has been limited to signify little more than the administration of medicines and the application of poultices. It ought to signify the proper use of fresh air, light, warmth, cleanliness, quiet, and the proper selection and administration of diet - all at the least expense of vital power to the patient.

42. We set the treatment of bodies so high above the treatment of souls, that the physician occupies a higher place in society than the school-master. The governess is to have every one of God's gifts; she is to do that which the mother herself is incapable of doing; but our son must not degrade himself by marrying the governess, nor our daughter the tutor, though she might marry the medical man.

43. What is the difference between a Doctor of Medicine and a Doctor of Theology? One prescribes drugs the other might as well be on drugs.

44. In the treatment of nervous cases, he is the best physician who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope.

45. There is a peculiarly modern predilection for psychological explanations of disease, as of everything else. Psychologizing seems to provide control over the experiences and events (like grave illnesses) over which people have in fact little or no control. Psychological understanding undermines the 'reality' of a disease. That reality has to be explained. (It really means; or is a symbol of; or must be interpreted so.) For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied. A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of 'spirit' over matter.

46. The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the diseases.

47. Is it not meningitis?

48. A skilful leech is better far Than half an hundred men of war, So he appear'd; and by his skill, No less than dint of sword, cou'd kill.

49. Doctors are men who pour drugs of which they know little, to cure diseases of which they know less, into human beings of whom they know nothing.

50. I went to the doctor because I'd swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills. My doctor told me to have a few drinks and get some rest.

51. I went to the doctor because I'd swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills. My doctor told me to have a few drinks and get some rest.

52. Did you ever have the measels, and if so, how many?

53. When they accepted their assignments they were not very confident, especially the assistant head surgeon who simply believed in his own past experience, in the statistics of international medical literature, and in the medical equipment and resources of the hospitals in capitalist countries. Therefore when he first heard the talk of the vice-superintendent, who was the secretary of the general Party branch, he had some inner feeling of resistance. He thought to himself, 'This is simply coercing people to try and do the impossible! But since I have accepted the assignment I'll do what I can. At any rate, the patients will die either in the shock stage or later.' With such downhearted feelings he entered the ward to see his patients.

54. Looking at this immensely swollen face in front of him the doctor gently consoled the patient, 'Comrade, don't worry and you will recover.' As a matter of fact, he was thinking quite the opposite, 'You will die. I can be of no more help.'

55. You that would last long, list to my song, Make no more coil, but buy of this oil. Would you be ever fair and young? Stout of teeth and strong of tongue? Tart of palate, quick of ear? Sharp of sight, of nostril clear? Moist of hand and light of foot? (Or, I will come nearer to it) Would you live free from all diseases, Do the act your mistress pleases; Yet fright all aches from your bones? Here's a medicine for the nones.

56. When a physician sees that his patient's strength is being exhausted so rapidly by the intensity of his agony that he will die of exhaustion before the medical processes inaugurated have a chance to do their curative work, he administers an opiate. But a good physician is always loath to do so, knowing that one of the influences of the opiate is to interfere with and defeat the medical processes themselves. He never does it except as a choice of evils. It is the same with the use of force, whether of the mob or of the State, upon diseased society; and not only those who prescribe its indiscriminate use as a sovereign remedy and a permanent tonic, but all who ever propose it as a cure, and even all who would lightly and unnecessarily resort to it, not as a cure, but as an expedient, are social quacks.

57. He's been on the verge of death so many times. ... His doctors themselves are in shock that he's still alive. Half the blood vessels in his brain are about to burst after his strokes, his intestines are spotted all over with holes, he has giant ulcers in his stomach, his heart is in absolutely disgusting condition, he is literally rotting ... He could die from any one of dozens of physical problems that he has, but contrary to all laws of nature -- he lives.

58. The most competent physician of our world advises the patient to listen to an ignorant doctor who the patient thinks is very competent rather than to a competent doctor who the patient thinks is ignorant. He reason is that our imagination works for our good health, and as long as it is supplemented by remedies, it is capable of healing us. But the most powerful remedies are too weak when the imagination does not apply them.

59. As I understand it, the claim is that the less you use Homeopathy, the better it works. Sounds plausible to me.[1]

60. Over the next three years, Krebiozin was destroyed. But to destroy Krebiozin you first had to destroy Andrew Ivy. How do you destroy the most influential, respected scientist in the United States? You get friends in the media. You get rid of his academic affiliations. You start a whisper campaign. And next thing you know, nobody wants to know the man. It took about five years, then they brought him up on a trial of fraud. It was at that point the longest medical trial in the United States' history. At the end of it, the jury found Ivy and the Durovic brothers innocent. Not only that, but they found the FDA irresponsible. And the jury actually made a statement, which is rare, about the contempt that the FDA had for honesty in what it did at trial.

61. For gold in phisike is a cordial; Therefore he loved gold in special.

62. Somewhere in the world is the world's worst doctor. And what's truly terrifying is that someone has an appointment with him tomorrow morning.

63. At the same time this is an extremely important practical application of the power of human knowledge, which may also be of immediate use to man, who, due to the implacable fortuities of life, is often mutilated in similar, though more varied ways.

64. This is a medical service. It always was.

65. There will be those who will be Kevorkian with class. They will look respectable. They will sound respectable. Their patients will be just as dead.

66. Mrs Prentice: My uterine contractions have been bogus for some time! Prentice: What a discovery! Married to the mistress of the fraudulent climax.

67. Sciatica: he cured it, by boyling his buttock.

68. On my recent course of antibiotics, every record sounded like that. (After playing an excerpt from 'Hairway to Steven' by Butthole Surfers)

69. I was told I could, if I wished, switch and get a Ph.D. in biochemistry but my preference was to stay with medicine. And I believe that this is all linked to my original ambition, or desire, which was to be of some help to humankind, so to speak, in a larger sense than just on a one-to-one basis. Just as I intended to study law, to make just laws, so I found myself interested now in the laws of nature, as distinct from the laws the people make.

70. That old standby of melodrama, the rich uncle shoved into the bin so the greedy relatives could get their hands on his estate, had a sound basis in fact. The Victorians cleaned up the straw and the chains of the old Bedlam-like institutions of the eighteenth century, but they didn't always clean up the practices. Patients were drugged, starved, drained of vast quantities of blood, beaten up, swung from ropes, immersed in cold water and whirled around in the air upside-down, all in the belief that it would improve their mental states. Ask yourself whether this is likely to have been true.

71. Staff and effigy of the animal which by shedding its skin is a sign of renewal - the symbol of medicine.

72. People rag on western medicine a lot for its disregard of indirect causalities and holism, for its antisceptic deconstructivism, for its blindness to things like the union of mind and body, and for its proclivity for post-facto treatment...But these criticisms notwithstanding, modern medicine is the accumulation of years and years of human effort to taxonomically observe, understand and explain an enormous set of conditions within a massively complex, underspecified system. To me, this is impressive. Also, they use cool phrases like 'the radiolucent lungs' and 'ligamentous laxity.'

73. It's a great game to look at the past, at an unscientific era, look at something there, and say have we got the same thing now, and where is it? So I would like to amuse myself with this game. First, we take witch doctors. The witch doctor says he knows how to cure. There are spirits inside which are trying to get out. ... Put a snakeskin on and take quinine from the bark of a tree. The quinine works. He doesn't know he's got the wrong theory of what happens. If I'm in the tribe and I'm sick, I go to the witch doctor. He knows more about it than anyone else. But I keep trying to tell him he doesn't know what he's doing and that someday when people investigate the thing freely and get free of all his complicated ideas they'll learn much better ways of doing it. Who are the witch doctors? Psychoanalysts and psychiatrists, of course.

74. Do you think they could make a drug to give you mental clarity into your golden years? No! But they have a drug to make you harder than Chinese algebra.

75. Politicians, quite rightly, are not surrounded by mystique. Doctors, quite wrongly, too often are.

76. A hot topic of late, expressed most notably in Bernie Siegel's best-selling books, has emphasized the role of positive attitude in combating such serious diseases as cancer. From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom.

77. The sign outside the shop said Apothecary, which meant that the shop was owned by a sort of early chemist, who would give you herbs and things until you got better or at least stopped getting any worse.

78. 'Treatment is symptomatic' - which means in the trade there is none.

79. In 1936, when my circulation and stomach rebelled...I called at Morell's private office. After a superficial examination...Morell prescribed for me his intestinal bacteria, dextrose, vitamins, and hormone tablets. For safety's sake I afterward had a thorough examination by Professor von Bergmann, the specialist in internal medicine at Berlin University. I was not suffering from any organic trouble, he concluded, but only from nervous symptoms caused by overwork. I slowed down my pace as best I could and the symptoms abated. To avoid offending Hitler I pretended that I was carefully following Morell's instructions, and since my health improved, I became for a time Morell's showpiece.

80. No one has ever told me precisely what is wrong with me. Morrell's method of cure is so logical that I have the greatest confidence in him. I shall follow his prescriptions to the letter.

81. What luck I had to meet Morell. He has saved my life.

82. A gross but deflated old man, of cringing manners, inarticulate in speech and with the hygiene habits of a pig, and could not conceive how a man so utterly devoid of self respect could ever have been selected as a personal physician by anyone who had even a limited possibility of choice.

83. You think I am crazy. You will try to give me morphine. Get out of here; you are sacked. Get that medical uniform off. Go home and act as if you had never had anything to do with me.

84. Take off that uniform and go back to being the doctor of Kurfurstendamm!

85. When taken, To be well shaken.

86. According to the world's highest medical authorities, burns extending over 75 per cent of a person's body are regarded as likely to prove fatal. The burns of these two patients were not only extensive but also deep, even involving their muscles in many places. Therefore all the experienced surgeons frowned, shook their heads, and expressed their utter inability to save the lives of these men. One of them said, 'It is only a matter of three or four days.' Another suggested, 'At most three days.' Still a third one said, 'Whether medicine is used or not is immaterial, for in spite of all efforts the patients will die.' Everybody seemed to agree on one conclusion 'death.' In this way the joint consultation was concluded in a very pessimistic and hopeless atmosphere. On the basis of mortality statistics in international medical literature it seemed that these badly burned patients were doomed to die. But the Party organization of the hospital would not agree to such a pessimistic view. The secretary of the general Party branch and the assistant secretary of the medical department branch immediately summoned the doctors treating the patients for a talk, and following that a meeting of all the responsible doctors was convened. The problem was analysed from a class viewpoint, and it was stressed that in capitalist countries it was impossible to obtain the full use of all resources to save the lives of burned workers, but that in our socialist country it was possible to mobilize everything available to save them. For this reason we should not always accept the medical statistics of capitalist countries and allow them to influence us. The Party secretary called the attention of the doctors specially to the following points: First, that they must try to rid themselves of their blind reliance on established bourgeois medical experience, and they must try to think, speak and act in bold new ways. Secondly, they must follow the mass line and depend more upon the power of the people. Finally he said, 'The Party will do everything possible to save these steel workers who have created vast wealth for the nation.'

87. The organ banks would be supplied for years. Not only would the crew have a full supply, which they always did anyway, but there would be spare parts for exceptional servants of the regime; i.e., for civil servants such as Jesus Pietro and his men. Even the colonists would benefit. It was not at all unusual for the Hospital to treat a sick but deserving colonist if the medical supplies were sufficient. The Hospital treated everyone they could. It reminded the colonists that the crew ruled in their name and had their interests at heart. And the Sons of Earth was dead. All but one man, and from his picture he wasn't old enough to be dangerous. Nonetheless Jesus Pietro had his picture tacked to the Hospital bulletin boards and sent a copy to the newscast station with the warning that he was wanted for questioning. It was not until dawn, when he was settling down to sleep, that he remembered who belonged to that face. Matthew Keller's nephew...

88. Under the market system, there is demand for a product if a lot of people want it - but that demand counts for nothing if those people have no money. If they lack money, their demand essentially doesn't exist...This explains why the drug industry is not investing money to develop a cure for a disease known as sleeping sickness, which leaves its victims in a coma. The disease...killed 66,000 people last year and threatens to infect 60 million more - but the only people who are afflicted by it are poverty-stricken Africans with no clout in the marketplace. Interestingly, there is a drug called eflornithine that is effective in lifting victims out of their comas. But drug companies stopped producing eflornithine in 1995 because it was no longer profitable to continue. The drug was still desperately needed, but only by people without money. So, following modern market practices, these people were simply left in a coma.

89. However, there are all sorts of behaviours in the Bible that might be called mad now, but aren't designated as insanity by the text itself. People see visions - of angels going up and down ladders, of fiery chariots - and, like Moses, who hears a bush talking, and Balaam the prophet who has a conversation with his donkey, they hear voices of those who cannot be said to be present in any usual sense of the word. They also speak in tongues, as the disciples do at Pentecost. Like madness, the visions, the voices and the speaking in tongues are due to external and usually divine agencies. In a world so permeated with supernatural powers, there are no accidents, and in one so riddled with prophets - who went into a frenzy while prophesying - many more kinds of behaviour were accepted as normal, at least for a prophet or an inspired person, than would be the case now. John the Baptist, dressed in animal skins and wandering around in the wilderness denouncing his social superiors, was not thought of as a de-institutionalized street person who's gone off his medications, but as a saint. And this was the pattern for mediaeval views of aberrant behaviour - if you were acting crazy it was a divine punishment, or else you were possessed, by powers either divine or demonic - perhaps aided, in the latter case, by witches.

90. I hear the doctor standing over me screamin I can make it/Got a body full of bullet holes layin here naked

91. And this is medicine?

92. Es gibt nur eine Heilkraft, und das ist die Natur; in Salben und Pillen steckt keine. Hochstens konnen sie der Heilkraft der Natur einen Wink geben, wo etwas fur sie zu tun ist.

93. The knowledge of anything, since all things have causes, is not acquired or complete unless it is known by its causes. Therefore in medicine we ought to know the causes of sickness and health. And because health and sickness and their causes are sometimes manifest, and sometimes hidden and not to be comprehended except by the study of symptoms, we must also study the symptoms of health and disease. Now it is established in the sciences that no knowledge is acquired save through the study of its causes and beginnings, if it has had causes and beginnings; nor completed except by knowledge of its accidents and accompanying essentials. Of these causes there are four kinds: material, efficient, formal, and final.

94. An ignorant doctor is the aide-de-camp of death.

95. Medicine considers the human body as to the means by which it is cured and by which it is driven away from health.

96. The time is not far distant when I shall be able to say that one doctor, with, perhaps, ten assistants, can probably effect several hundred if not one thousand sterilizations in a single day.

97. The non-surgical method of sterilizing women that I have invented is now almost perfected... As for the questions that you have directed to me, sir, I can today answer them in the way that I had anticipated: if the research that I am carrying out continues to yield the sort of results that it has produced so far (and there is no reason to suppose that this shall not be the case), then I shall be able to report in the foreseeable future that one experienced physician, with an appropriately equipped office and the aid of ten auxiliary personnel, will be able to carry out in the course of a single day the sterilization of hundreds, or even 1,000 women.

98. I mean, you trust them with your life! They could have their fingers in your nostrils, one foot on the back of your underpants, and they're pushing your spine away with a broom. 'What's this one all about?' 'I have no idea : [slingshot] Wherever he falls, there shall he be buried!'

99. Most people die in improvised circumstances of harassment and confusion, whether in hospital or out of it.

100. How you answer the question, whether individuals should be persuaded to live their whole lives in a state of chemical dependency, first upon contraceptive steroids and then on replacement therapy, depends upon your regard for the autonomy of the individual. If men would not live their lives this way, why should women?