Quotes about doctors
Lance Armstrong - It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life
The night before brain surgery, I thought about death. I searched out my larger values, and I asked myself, if I was going to die, did I want to do it fighting and clawing or in peaceful surrender? What sort of character did I hope to show? Was I content with myself and what I had done with my life so far? I decided that I was essentially a good person, although I could have been better--but at the same time I understood that the cancer didn't care.I asked myself what I believed. I had never pra
Chuck Palahniuk - Choke
After you find out all the things that can go wrong, your life becomes less about living and more about waiting.
Suzy Kassem - Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
Love is a chemical reaction,But it cannot be fully understood or defined by science.And though a body cannot exist without a soul,It too cannot be fully understood or defined by science.Love is the most powerful form of energy,But science cannot decipher its elements.Yet the best cure for a sick soul is love,But even the most advanced physicianCannot prescribe it as medicine.INCOMPLETE SCIENCE by Suzy Kassem
Suzy Kassem - Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
THE MAXIMS OF MEDICINE Before you examine the body of a patient,Be patient to learn his story.For once you learn his story,You will also come to knowHis body.Before you diagnose any sickness,Make sure there is no sickness in the mind or heart.For the emotions in a man’s moon or sun,Can point to the sickness inAny one of his other parts.Before you treat a man with a condition,Know that not all cures can heal all people.For the chemistry that works on one patient,May not work for the next,Because
JohnA Passaro - 6 Minutes Wrestling With Life
Mr. Passaro, let me teach you about how medicine works.” He starts out.“One of two things is going to happen. Either the Doctors are going to say I told you so, or they are going to say that Jess was the exception. What you believe will determine who gets to say I told you so to whom.” “Never stop believing.” He begs me.“Doctor, you are on the team”. I say.He smiles.
Stephanie Kuehn - Charm & Strange
You have a history of starving yourself," he says gently.I lift my head. I meet his gaze. "I have a history that I don't like to talk about.
Caitlin Moran - How to Be a Woman
You wanted to become a doctor to help people and feel better at the end of your job, I think, watching them, as the nurse takes my hand. But I don't think you do feel better at the end of the day. You look like humans have constantly disappointed you.
Brad Thor - Black List
Human beings are the most successful of animals because of their capability to learn, and an abused animal learns very quickly to defend itself. It also learns very quickly to trust very few people - if any.
Philip K. Dick - VALIS
You know what the doctor said to me to cheer me up?" Fat said. "There are worse diseases than cancer.""Did he show you slides?"We both laughed. When you are nearly crazy with grief, you laugh at what you can.
Hippocrates -
The life so short, the craft so long to learn.
Crystal Woods - Write like no one is reading 2
I finally gave in today. Admitting that I haven't been able to do it alone, that's defeat right? But do a couple pills change why I'm here? Will my spirit be altered? Do my passions change? Will I lose hope either way? My madness is what makes me. It’s my most unique beauty.
Richard Diaz -
Most doctors are prisoners of their education and shackled by their profession.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana -
One of the most common and most dangerous misbeliefs is that it is impossible for someone to be stupid just because they are a doctor or a lawyer.
Amit Kalantri -
People wishes their friends to be in politics, but their sons in professions.
Judy Melinek - and the Making of a Medical Examiner
To confront death every day, to see it yourself, you have to love the living.
Suzy Kassem - Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
Love is a chemical reaction, but it cannot be fully understood or defined by science. And though a body cannot exist without a soul, it too cannot be fully understood or defined by science.Love is the most powerful form of energy, but science cannot decipher its elements. Yet the best cure for a sick soul is love, but even the most advanced physician cannot prescribe it as medicine.
Rebecca McNutt -
All the whackjob psychologists out there will tell you that grief is a process. Some say it has five stages. Others say that grief should only last two years at the lost, otherwise it's "abnormal". Putting an expiration date of grief though is like putting out the flame on a burning candle. It might stop the candle from melting down and falling apart, but in the long run the candle goes solid, freezes in a catatonic state. Take away a person's grief and guaranteed they'll only be a frozen shell
John E. Sarno - Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection
It is perfectly acceptable to have a physical problem in our culture, but people tend to shy away from anything that has to do with the emotions.
John E. Sarno - Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection
There's nothing like a little physical pain to keep your mind off your emotional problems.
John E. Sarno - Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection
Acknowledging the important role of the emotions in health and illness, medicine must reexamine its concepts of disease causation.
Lisa Bedrick - A Christian Look at Psychology Topics
It's like the commercial, "Once you pop you can't stop." Once you pop a pill, you can't stop. They have you hooked and they know it. Like a drug dealer, they are so happy they have won another loyal customer. Not loyal because you want to be, but loyal because your body is now completely dependent on them and their legal prescription "drugs."
SupaNova Slom -
Don't let sickness, depression, and disease THUG YOU OUT. Eat healthier, think healthier, speak healthier, and more positively over your life. When you do so, you will soon begin to conquer your life and your health through new found empowerment- mind, body, and spirit.
Aleksandar Hemon - The Book of My Lives
The cafeteria in the Chicago’s Children’s Memorial Hospital basement was the saddest place in the world—and forever it shall be—with its grim neon lights and gray tabletops and the diffuse foreboding of those who stepped away from suffering children to have a grilled cheese sandwich.
Abhijit Naskar - What is Mind?
Observing the medical histories of various neurological syndromes is like observing the fascinating nerve cells of the human brain in action, while they construct what we so proudly call the Human Consciousness. They remind us of the overwhelming aspects of human silliness. They remind us how such a simple natural response of the human Biology, is misinterpreted as the “last surviving mystery” of this planet.
Suzy Kassem - Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
We are often given pills or fluids to help remedy illness, yet little has been taught to us about the power of smell to do the exact same thing. It is known that the scent of fresh rosemary increases memory, but this cure for memory loss is not divulged by doctors to help the elderly. I also know that the most effective use of the blue lotus flower is not from its dilution with wine or tea – but from its scent. To really maximize the positive effects of the blue lily (or the pink lotus), it must
Steven Magee - Health Forensics
The summit of Mauna Kea should never have been developed as it is not safe for humans up there. I am now locked into an endless loop of doctors visits for what appears to be classic very high altitude heart, lung & brain damage because I was unfortunate enough to have worked there.
Suzy Kassem - Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
Before you examine the body of a patient, be patient to learn his story. For once you learn his story, you will also come to know his body.
Suzy Kassem - Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
Before you diagnose any sickness, make sure there is no sickness in the mind or heart. For the emotions in a man's moon or sun, can point to the sickness in any one of his other parts.
Amit Kalantri -
Not only a man without hand is handicapped but also a man without health.
Amit Kalantri -
A doctor, a teacher and a politician have no caste.
Adeline Yen Mah - Falling Leaves: The Memoir of an Unwanted Chinese Daughter
In the early 1970s, racial and gender discrimination was still prevalent. The easy camaraderie prevailing in the operating room evaporated at the completion of surgical procedures. There was an unspoken pecking order of seating arrangements at lunch among my fellow physicians. At the top were the white male 'primary producers' in prestigious surgical specialties. They were followed by the internists. Next came the general practitioners. Last on the list were the hospital-based physicians: the ra
Laurie Notaro - The Idiot Girls' Action-Adventure Club: True Tales from a Magnificent and Clumsy Life
Dr. Bone Specialist came in, made me stand up and hobble across the room, checked my reflexes, and then made me lie down on the table. He bent my right knee this way and that, up and down, all the way out to the side and in. Then he did the same with my left leg. He ordered X rays then started to leave the room. I panicked. I MUST GET DRUGS."What can I take for the pain?" I asked him before he got out the door."You can take some over the counter ibuprofen," he suggested. "But I wouldn't take mor
Libba Bray -
I've been poked and prodded in places I'd always prided myself on keeping untouched for that one special doctor who gives me a ring and a promise someday.
Suzy Kassem - Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
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.
Ha Myung-hee (writer) - Doctors (닥터스)
I'm going to go where my heart takes me, even if it's a messy road.
W.H. Auden -
What is peculiar and novel to our age is that the principal goal of politics in every advanced society is not, strictly speaking, a political one, that is today, it is not concerned with human beings as persons and citizens, but with human bodies. ... In all technologically advanced countries today, whatever political label they give themselves, their policies have, essentially, the same goal: to guarantee to every member of society, as a psychophysical organism, the right to physical and mental
Elbert Hubbard -
Two-thirds of all preachers, doctors and lawyers are hanging on to the coat tails of progress, shouting, whoa! while a good many of the rest are busy strewing banana peels along the line of march.
Angela Thirkell - Wild Strawberries
What does Mrs Preston want to go abroad for?' asked Mr Leslie.'I think her doctor wanted her to, Father,' said Agnes.'Doctors!' said Mr Leslie, wiping the whole of the Royal College of Physicians off the face of the world with this withering remark.
Atul Gawande - Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
You don’t have to spend much time with the elderly or those with terminal illness to see how often medicine fails the people it is supposed to help. The waning days of our lives are given over to treatments that addle our brains and sap our bodies for a sliver’s chance of benefit. They are spent in institutions—nursing homes and intensive care units—where regimented, anonymous routines cut us off from all the things that matter to us in life. Our reluctance to honestly examine the experience of
Atul Gawande -
I am in a profession that has succeeded because of its ability to fix. If your problem is fixable, we know just what to do. But if it’s not? The fact that we have had no adequate answers to this question is troubling and has caused callousness, inhumanity, and extraordinary suffering.
Jessica Verdi - My Life After Now
Listen, I wanted to say, I don't need your judgment, okay? I have enough to deal with without you contributing, so can we just get on with this so I can get out of here?But I couldn't form the words. Dr. Johnson viewed me as a child, and somehow, under his contemptuous gaze, I had regressed to one. I was frightened and shy, and it was all I could do to answer his questions and count the seconds until the end of the visit.
John Lanchester - Capital
Petunia only ever went to the doctor reluctantly, and her motive in doing so was always the same: she did it in order to feel less anxious about things. The doctor was supposed to make the worry go away; she did quite enough worrying without actually having something to worry about. When she came out feeling no less anxious, as this time, something had gone wrong. The basic contract had been broken.
Gary Taubes -
...Why is it, that from the moment you enter medical school to the moment you retire, that the only disorder you will ever diagnosis with a physics book - is obesity? This is biology folks, it's endocrinology, it's physiology - physics has nothing to do with it. The law of thermodynamics is always true, [but] the energy balance equation is irrelevant...
Will Advise - Nothing is here...
I wonder how Japan's futuristic robot doctors will treat the worst and most widespread disease humanity already has - artificially lowered IQ. Making people stupider makes them buy more stuff – so “How many robots can you afford?” will be the big question of one of the following decades, unless we go back to Communism and produce everything for the sake of it, for free.
M.K. Gilher - Revival
I lay my cheek on his solid back. I realize this is the real Jacade. The man who’s strong and fierce, but vulnerable and damaged. Confident and dominating, but generous and kind.
Kerry Okines - Old Before My Time: Hayley Okines' Life with Progeria
And to all the doctors and people who said there was no hope for children with progeria and they don’t live long I want to say, ‘You’re wrong.
Bill Lawrence -
JD/Dr Cox: The second you start blaming yourself for people's deaths, there's no coming back.
Deyth Banger -
Doctors sometimes don't know what they do!
Colin A. Ross - The C.I.A. Doctors: Human Rights Violations by American Psychiatrists
There have been extensive human rights violations by American psychiatrists over the last 70 years. These doctors were pad by the American taxpayer through CIA and military contracts. It is past time for these abuses to stop, it is past time for a reckoning, and it is past time for individual doctors to be held accountable. The Manchurian Candidate Programs are of much more than "historical" interest. ARTICHOKE, BLUEBIRD, MKULTRA and MKSEARCH are precursors of mind control programs that are oper
Steven Magee -
Many people over forty have at least one health condition that affects their ability to work a forty hour work week effectively. Human Resources (HR), doctors and governments have known this fact for decades.
Abraham Verghese - Cutting for Stone
My father, for whose skills as a surgeon I have the deepest respect, says, "The operation with the best outcome is the one you decide not to do." Knowing when not to operate, knowing when I am in over my head, knowing when to call for the assistance of a surgeon of my father's caliber--that kind of talent, that kind of "brilliance," goes unheralded.
Herbert M. Shelton - Getting Well
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.
Atul Gawande - Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance
One American in seven has no coverage, and one in three younger than sixty-five will lose coverage at some point in the next two years. These are people who aren't poor or old enough to qualify for government programs but whose jobs aren't good enough to provide benefits either.
Ben Marcus - Leaving the Sea
Like most doctors, the fanciest ones, he seemed offensively healthy, as if he kept the real secret of vitality to himself. He would live forever and people would crumble and die around him. You were supposed to feel like death after seeing him, in terms of your complexion, your posture, your whole body. If necessary, this doctor would eat you to survive.
Anonymous -
No doctor knows everything. There's a reason why it's called "practising" medicine.
Hugh Greene -
Dr Power stood up. “Because your staff are not components that can be fitted in, or replaced when they are unpredictable, or when they are simply being human. Because our patients are not playing a game called ‘business’ with profit and loss and winners and losers. Because patients have no choice, but to be patients and it’s our privilege to be in a temporary position where we can help them. And, inevitably, when we ourselves fall ill; when we grow old, then we can only hope that we will receive
Jean-Jacques Rousseau -
A feeble body makes a feeble mind. I do not know what doctors cure us of, but I know this: they infect us with very deadly diseases, cowardice, timidity, credulity, the fear of death. What matter if they make the dead walk, we have no need of corpses; they fail to give us men, and it is men we need.
Nilesh Sakpal -
She hadn't seen a doctor cry before, they usually don't, that makes itharder.- Anita
Norman Cousins - Anatomy of an Illness
Each patient carries his own doctor inside him.
Suzy Kassem - Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
Before asserting a prognosis on any patient, always be objective and never subjective. For telling a man that he will win the treasure of life, but then later discovering that he will lose, will harm him more than by telling him that he may lose, but then he wins.
Paul Kalanithi -
Everything teeters between pathos and bathos: here you are, violating society's most fundamental taboos and yet formaldehyde is a powerful appetite stimulant, so you also crave a burrito.
Paul Kalanithi -
What patients seek is not scientific knowledge that doctors hide but existential authenticity each person must find on her own. Getting too deeply into statistics is like trying to quench a thirst with salty water. The angst of facing mortality has no remedy in probability.
Adelaide Crapsey - Verse by Adelaide Crapsey
If illness' end be health regained then I Will pay you, Asculapeus, when I die.
Robert G. Ingersoll - Woman and Child
What would have become of the people five hundred years ago if they had followed strictly the advice of the doctors? They would have all been dead. What would the people have been, if at any age of the world they had followed implicitly the direction of the church? They would have all been idiots. It is a splendid thing that there is always some grand man who will not mind, and who will think for himself. I believe in allowing the children to think for thems
Benjamin Rush -
Unless we put medical freedom into the Constitution the time will come when medicine will organize itself into an undercover dictatorship. To restrict the art of healing to doctors and deny equal privileges to others will constitute the Bastille of medical science. All such laws are un-American and despotic.
Marcel Proust - Sodom and Gomorrah
The mistakes of doctors are innumerable. They err as a rule out of optimism as to the treatment, and pessimism as to the outcome.
Michael Robotham - Lost
You want some advice?""Yes""Never go to a doctor whose office plants have died.
Antonella Gambotto-Burke - The Eclipse: A Memoir of Suicide
Classifying depression as an illness serves the psychiatric community and pharmaceutical corporations well; it also soothes the frightened, guilty, indifferent, busy, sadistic, and unschooled. To understand depression as a call for life-changes is not profitable. Stagnation is not a medical term. The 17.5 million Americans diagnosed as suffering a major depression in 1997 were mostly damned. (Psychobiological examinations confuse cause and symptom.) Deficient serotonergic functioning, ventral pr
Raheel Farooq -
Never congratulate a doctor for the fast recovery of a patient.
Atul Gawande - Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science
The core predicament of medicine - the thing that makes being a patient so wrenching, being a doctor so difficult, and being a part of society that pays the bills they run up so vexing - is uncertainty. With all that we know nowadays about people and diseases and how to diagnose and treat them, it can be hard to see this, hard to grasp how deeply uncertainty runs. As a doctor, you come to find, however, that the struggle in caring for people is more often with what you do not know than what you
Atul Gawande - Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science
We want progress in medicine to be clear and unequivocal, but of course it rarely is. Every new treatment has gaping unknowns - for both patients and society - and it can be hard to decide what do do about them.
Denis Parsons Burkitt -
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.
Thomas Hager - One Doctor's Heroic Search for the World'
Where there were once several competing approaches to medicine, there is now only one that matters to most hospitals, insurers, and the vast majority of the public. One that has been shaped to a great degree by the successful development of potent cures that followed the discovery of sulfa drugs. Aspiring caregivers today are chosen as much (or more) for their scientific abilities, their talent for mastering these manifold technological and pharmaceutical advances as for their interpersonal skil
Ernest Hemingway - A Farewell to Arms
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.
David Foster Wallace - Infinite Jest
Doctors tend to enter the arenas of their profession's practice with a brisk good cheer that they have to then stop and try to mute a bit when the arena they're entering is a hospital's fifth floor, a psych ward, where brisk good cheer would amount to a kind of gloating. This is why doctors on psych wards so often wear a vaguely fake frown of puzzled concentration, if and when you see them in fifth-floor halls. And this is why a hospital M.D.--who's usually hale and pink-cheeked and poreless, an
Olivia Sudjic - Sympathy
I saw a doctor. I went in case there were any remnants of the summer inside me—sticky, slender fish bones that needed to be scraped into the bin. He was dismissive of my concerns and said my body would have let me know by now. Did I have what was known as female intuition? I said I'd had my feminine intuition somewhat scrambled in the past.
Leo Tolstoy - War and Peace
Though the doctors treated him, let his blood, and gave him medications to drink, he nevertheless recovered.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. - Mr. Rosewater
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.
Terry Pratchett - Equal Rites
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.
Edward E. Rosenbaum - A Taste of My Own Medicine: When the Doctor Is the Patient
Doctors are great--as long as you don't need them.
Pamela Grim - Just Here Trying to Save a Few Lives: Tales of Life and Death from the ER
Every day," I said, "every day I go to work and I see my granddad. I see the drunks and the addicts, the people who have fallen right off the edge of the earth. I see people who have made every bad move anyone could make, made every major mistake there was to be made, and by the time I see them, they are paying for it, sometimes with their lives. That's why they came to the ER. "When you work in emergency medicine, you are seeing patients who are the least common denominator as far as human bein
Anurag Shourie - Half A Shadow
Being a doctor, you are not supposed to give vent to any signs of revulsion on encountering the most noxious of odours or the most gruesome of sights.
George Bernard Shaw - The Doctor's Dilemma: A Tragedy
Well, I've known over thirty men who've found out how to cure consumption. Why do people go on dying of it, Colly? Devilment I suppose!
Atul Gawande - Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance
Do what is right, and do it now.
Agatha Christie - A Murder Is Announced
I always feel that young doctors are only too anxious too experiment. After they've whipped out all our teeth, and administered quantities of very peculiar glands, and removed bits of our insides, they then confess that nothing can be done for us. I really prefer the old-fashioned remedy of big black bottles of medicine. After all, one can always pour those down the sink.
Philip Ball - The Devil's Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science
A so-called antimony war had been waged between French [Galenist] physicians and [alchemical, Paracelsian] iatrochemists since the beginning of the seventeenth century. What it lacked in bloodletting, this war made up for in bile.
Adeline Yen Mah - Falling Leaves: The Memoir of an Unwanted Chinese Daughter
Alcenith Crawford (a divorced ophthalmologist): "We women doctors have un-happy marriages because in our minds we are the superstars of our families. Having survived the hardship of medical school we expect to reap our rewards at home. We had to assert ourselves against all odds and when we finally graduate there are few shrinking violets amongst us. It takes a special man to be able to cope. Men like to feel important and be the undisputed head of the family. A man does not enjoy waiting for hi
Temple Grandin - The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum
Label-locked thinking can affect treatment. For instance, I heard a doctor say about a kid with gastrointestinal issues, “Oh, he has autism. That’s the problem”—and then he didn’t treat the GI problem.
Philip Ball - The Devil's Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science
No matter who you were in sixteenth-century Europe, you could be sure of two things: you would be lucky to reach fifty years of age, and you could expect a life of discomfort and pain. Old age tires the body by thirty-five, Erasmus lamented, but half the population did not live beyond the age of twenty. There were doctors and there was medicine, but there does not seem to have been a great deal of healing. Anyone who could afford to seek a doctor's aid did so eagerly, but the doctor was as likel
Charles F. Glassman - Brain Drain The Breakthrough That Will Change Your Life
Medicine’s a funny business. After all, dispensing chemicals is considered mainstream and diet and nutrition is considered alternative.
Christopher Marlowe - Dr. Faustus
What art thou Faustus, but a man condemned to die?
Roman Payne -
My girl was mad and I loved her. Upon a night, she read my poetry; and kissing me madly she cried, ‘You are a genius, my love!’ To which I replied, ‘My girl,’ whispering, ‘Every doctor in this land with a prescription pad is more of a genius than I.
Edward E. Rosenbaum -
There is no such thing as an infallible doctor.
Jane Wilson-Howarth - A Glimpse of Eternal Snows: A Journey of Love and Loss in the Himalayas
GPs are almost the only doctors these days who understand all problems, can see the whole person…spend time with the dying…see things through to the end.
Craig Ferguson - American on Purpose: The Improbable Adventures of an Unlikely Patriot
I told her that I didn't want to take any drugs. That I had come here not to take drugs. "Listen," she said, not unkindly, "up until now I would say that ninety-nine percent of all the narcotics you have taken in your life you bought from guys you didn't know, in bathrooms or on street corners, something like that. Correct?"I nodded."Well these guys could have been selling you salt or strychnine. They didn't care. They wanted your money. I don't care about your money, and, unlike your previous s
William S. Burroughs - Junky
You need a good bedside manner with doctors or you will get nowhere.
Suzy Kassem - Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
Before you treat a man with a condition, know that not all cures can heal all people. For the chemistry that works on one patient may not work for the next, because even medicine has its own conditions.
Axel Munthe - The Story of San Michele
To become a good dog-doctor it is necessary to love dogs, but it is also necessary to understand them - the same as with us, with the difference that it is easier to understand a dog than a man and easier to love him.
Margaret Mitchell - Gone with the Wind
Fo' Gawd, Miss Scarlett! We's got ter have a doctah. Ah- Ah- Miss Scarlett, Ah doan know nuthin' 'bout bringin' babies. -Prissy