A doctor, like anyone else who has to deal with human beings, each of them unique, cannot be a scientist; he is either, like the surgeon, a craftsman, or, like the physician and the psychologist, an artist. This means that in order to be a good doctor a man must also have a good character, that is to say, whatever weaknesses and foibles he may have, he must love his fellow human beings in the concrete and desire their good before his own.
Cure the disease and kill the patient.
When a man goes through six years training to be a doctor he will never be the same. He knows too much.
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.
Nature, time and patience are the three great physicians.
Never go to a doctor whose office plants have died.
Doctors will have more lives to answer for in the next world than even we generals.
A skilful leech is better far, than half a hundred men of war.
Doctors are just the same as lawyers; the only difference is that lawyers merely rob you, whereas doctors rob you and kill you too.
I asked [my doctors] if I'd be able to play singles tennis and they said I could. That made me very happy since I haven't played in five years.
Surgeons must be very careful. When they take the knife!, underneath their fine incisions, stirs the Culprit -- Life!
The best doctor is the one you run to and can't find.
I observe the physician with the same diligence as the disease.
When a doctor does go wrong he is the first of criminals. He has nerve and he has knowledge.
The more ignorant, reckless and thoughtless a doctor is, the higher his reputation soars even amongst powerful princes.
The practice of medicine is a thinker's art, the practice of surgery a plumber s.
God heals and the doctor takes the fee.
The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.
Employment is nature's physician, and is essential to human happiness.
The doctor found, when she was dead, her last disorder mortal.
The physician's highest calling, his only calling, is to make sick people healthy -- to heal, as it is termed.
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.
Deceive not thy physician, confessor, nor lawyer.
Life is short, the art long, opportunity fleeting, experiment treacherous, judgment difficult.
Whenever a doctor cannot do good, he must be kept from doing harm.
What I call a good patient is one who, having found a good physician, sticks to him till he dies.
It is the duty of a doctor to prolong life and it is not his duty to prolong the act of dying.
I suppose one has a greater sense of intellectual degradation after an interview with a doctor than from any human experience.
My doctor gave me six months to live but when I couldn't pay the bill, he gave me six months more.
I wasn't driven into medicine by a social conscience but by rampant curiosity.
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.
The first duties of the physician is to educate the masses not to take medicine.
Time is generally the best doctor.
— Ovid
Is it not also true that no physician, in so far as he is a physician, considers or enjoins what is for the physician's interest, but that all seek the good of their patients? For we have agreed that a physician strictly so called, is a ruler of bodies, and not a maker of money, have we not?
— Plato
Cured yesterday of my disease, I died last night of my physician.
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.
The superior doctor prevents sickness; The mediocre doctor attends to impending sickness; The inferior doctor treats actual sickness;
A surgeon should be young a physician old.
Physician, heal thyself.
Every invalid is a physician.
If the doctor cures, the sun sees it; if he kills, the earth hides it.
There are more old drunkards than old physicians.
Temperance and labor are the two real physicians of man.
Doctors don't know everything really. They understand matter, not spirit. And you and I live in spirit.
The doctor learns that if he gets ahead of the superstitions of his patients he is a ruined man; and the result is that he instinctively takes care not to get ahead of them.
Every doctor will allow a colleague to decimate a whole countryside sooner than violate the bond of professional etiquette by giving him away.
There are worse occupations in this world than feeling a woman's pulse.
The best doctors in the world are Doctor Diet, Doctor Quiet, and Doctor Merryman.
He has been a doctor a year now and has had two patients, no, three, I think -- yes, it was three; I attended their funerals.
A patient going to a doctor for his first visit was asked, And whom did you consult before coming to me? Only the village druggist, was the answer. And what sort of foolish advice did that numbskull give you? asked the doctor, his tone and manner denoting his contempt for the advice of the layman. Oh, replied his patient, with no malice aforethought, he told me to come and see you.
The difference between an itch and an allergy is about one hundred bucks.
The doctor knows what his trained eyes see -- and he says it's the last of the ninth for me. So one more thing while the clouds loom dark and then I must leave this noisy park.
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
Men who are occupied in the restoration of health to other men, by the joint exertion of skill and humanity, are above all the great of the earth. They even partake of divinity, since to preserve and renew is almost as noble as to create.
— Voltaire
I know of nothing more laughable than a doctor who does not die of old age.
— Voltaire
The majority of the diseases which the human family have been and still are suffering under, they have created by ignorance of their own organic health, and work perseveringly to tear themselves to pieces, and when broken down and debilitated in body and mind, send for the doctor and drug themselves to death.
For what Harley Street specialist has time to understand the body, let alone the mind or both in combination, when he is a slave to thirteen thousand a year?