Medicine Quotes - Page 2

But against sandfly fever one could be inoculated, and I have another, hideously vivid picture of a great menacing brute of a doctor sticking a Thing that ended in a vicious needle into my mother's arm. Mad to defend my own, I scrambled off my father's knee, and flew to her rescue. I fixed my teeth in the doctor's horrible hairy wrist and hung on like a terrier, until my father succeeded in prising me away. Afterwards, everybody said how wonderful the doctor had been, because he continued calmly giving the inoculation while I was prised off him, instead of breaking the needle in my mother's arm. But nobody said how brave it was of me, only three years old, when all is said and done, and gone in the legs at that, to take on such fearful odds for the sake of love.

In the community of living tissues, the uncontrolled mob of misfits that is cancer behaves like a gang of perpetually wilding adolescents. They are the juvenile delinquents of cellular society.

I'm taking inorganic chem and physics not because I want to but because I have to. Not every doctor wants to be a scientist. Some of us just want to take care of sick people. I can't help thinking that medicine is more closely aligned to the humanities than to the sciences. I can't help thinking that I could learn more about being a good doctor from William Shakespeare than I could from Isaac Newton. After all, isn't understanding people at least as important as understanding pathology?

The history of medicine is a story of amazing foolishness and amazing intelligence.

But such is the nature of man that as soon as you begin to force him to do a thing, from that moment he begins to seek ways by which he can avoid doing the thing you are trying to force upon him. A man with malaria parasites in his blood is a danger to his companions. To kill all the parasites, he was then required to continue doses of quinine a week or ten days after his fever. When the convalescing men were given their daily dose of quinine they would manage to throw their tablets out of the dispensary window. The old turkey-gobbler pet of the hospital gobbled up all the tablets he could find. He became so dissipated he finally developed a species of blindness caused by too much quinine. I cannot vouch for this, but I was often twitted with this story as an illustration of how the men were treating prophylactic quinine.

If there is a credo in practical medicine, it is that the important thing is to be sensible.

A human being who is first of all an invalid is all body therein lies his inhumanity and his debasement.

...by the end of my first week as an intern, I am just about ready to throw my pager out the window. A high window. Overlooking a trash compactor. Filled with highly corrosive acid.

I think that modern medicine has become like a prophet offering a life free of pain. It is nonsense. The only thing I know that truly heals people is unconditional love.

Good medicine always tastes bad.

The wheel of life: one generation rises like summer wheat, then withers and falls to seed. The wheel turns - birth, youth, adulthood, parenthood, senescence, death - driven by genetic machinery set in motion so many eons ago. For all its subtleties and infinite beauty, life has but one purpose: to keep the wheel turning.

Isn’t it a bit unnerving that doctors call what they do “practice”?

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

..my music isn't just music- its medicine.

The mistakes of doctors are innumerable. They err as a rule out of optimism as to the treatment, and pessimism as to the outcome.

What is rational in the practice of thoughtful medicine is impractical for the system.

Medicine is not a book but mind, not a business but life

A general flavour of mild decay but nothing local as one may say.

First do no harm. -HippocratesSecond, do some good. -Anne M. Lipton, M.D., Ph.D.

The poets did well to conjoin music and medicine, in Apollo, because the office of medicine is but to tune the curious harp of man's body and reduce it to harmony.

It now appears most of us need about 5,000 units a day if we avoid the sun. The government was off by a factor of ten; an ,i>“order-of-magnitude error.”,/i> Mistakes of this scale are rare in medicine.

Love in your heart is good medicine for long live. Hatred in your blood is the major cause of heart failure! Love people, get transfused with a fresh blood and you'll live long!

If a man thinks about his physical or moral state he usually discovers that he is ill.

Homeopathy is the safest and more reliable approach to ailments and has withstood the assaults of established medical practice for over 100 years

The doctor if he forgets he is only the assistant to nature and zealously takes over the stage may so add to what nature is already doing well that he actually throws the patient into shock by the vigour he adds to nature's forces.

I came I saw I concurred.

The greatest mistake in the treatment of diseases is that there are physicians for the body and physicians for the soul, although the two cannot be separated.

Indeed, this crisis was also spurred by the abandonment of professional ideals in the pursuit of profit that made managed care necessary in the first place.

Statistics are somewhat like old medical journals, or like revolvers in newly opened mining districts. Most men rarely use them, and find it troublesome to preserve them so as to have them easy of access; but when they do want them, they want them badly.

Of the many 'firsts' with which I have been involved at the Texas Heart Institute —including the first successful human heart transplant in the United States and the first total artificial heart transplant in the world—the achievement that may have the greatest impact on health care did not occur in the operating room or in the research laboratory. It happened on a piece of paper... when we created the first-ever packaged pricing plan for cardiovascular surgical procedures.

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

The only mistake you can make is not asking for help.

I have done so much medical and scientific research Crashing Life I am thinking about putting PhD behind my name or maybe B.S.

If men could get pregnant abortion would be a sacrament.

The cure of even one solid cancer in adults, Farber knew, would singularly revolutionize oncology. It would provide the most concrete proof that this was a winnable war.

Too old for dolls. Too ill for tablets.

The tongue ever turns to the aching tooth.

Saving life and avoiding death are typically shorthand for far less evocative terms: lengthening life and delaying death.

To her despair was added a philosophical dejection, the feeling of every thinker who, venturing an inquisitive finger beneath the velvet of a throne, comes upon the coarse pinewood . . . And then it was she fell victim to a still more painful disquiet. The dead man they had just carted off, like a lump of matter no longer of any use, made it hideously plain how closely hospitals resemble factories. Under the scalpel, living flesh is treated there like wood under the plane or steel under the rolling-mill.

I was temperamentally better suited to a cognitive discipline, to an introspective field—internal medicine, or perhaps psychiatry. The sight of the operating theater made me sweat. The idea of holding a scalpel caused coils to form in my belly. (It still does.) Surgery was the most difficult thing I could imagine.And so I became a surgeon.

My top priority is for people to understand that they have the power to change things themselves.

Homeopathy is the only non-violent health care system

What each culture views as the cause of madness is dependent on its world view.

All things are poison and nothing is without poison, only the dose permits something not to be poisonous.

Symptoms then are in reality nothing but the cry from suffering organs.

Labs, too, can become machines. In science, it is more often a pejorative description than a complimentary one: an efficient, thrumming, technically accomplished laboratory is like a robot orchestra that produces perfectly pitched tunes but no music.

It is very difficult to slow down. The practice of medicine is like the heart muscle's contraction - it's all or none.

The possibilities and probabilities are all we have to work with in medicine, though. What we are drawn to in this imperfect science, what we in fact covet in our way, is the alterable moment-the fragile but crystalline opportunity for one's know-how, ability, or just gut instinct to change the course of another's life for the better.

Empathy requires being attuned to the patient's perspective and understanding how the illness is woven into this particular persons' life. Last--and this is where doctors often stumble--empathy requires being able to communicate all of this to the patient.

I would not be among you to-night (being awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine) but for the mentors, colleagues and students who have guided and aided me throughout my scientific life. I wish I could name them all and tell you their contributions. More, however, than anyone else it was the late Rudolf Schoenheimer, a brilliant scholar and a man of infectious enthusiasm, who introduced me to the wonders of Biochemistry. Ever since, I have been happy to have chosen science as my career, and, to borrow a phrase of Jacques Barzun, have felt that 'Science is, in the best and strictest sense, glorious entertainment'.

Is psychiatry a medical enterprise concerned with treating diseases, or a humanistic enterprise concerned with helping persons with their personal problems? Psychiatry could be one or the other, but it cannot--despite the pretensions and protestations of psichiatrists--be both.

Physicians of the Utmost Fame were called at once but when they came they answered as they took their fees 'There is no cure for this disease.'

The standard treatments for cancer are not meant to heal, but to destroy.

A slow but steady transformation of deviance has taken place in American society. It has not been a change in behavior as such, but in how behavior is defined. Deviant behaviors that were once defined as immoral, sinful, or criminal have been given medical meanings. Some say that rehabilitation has replaced punishment, but in many cases medical treatments have become a new form of punishment and social control.

Frostpine made a face. Lifting the cup, he dumped its contents down his throat. “Auugghh!” he yelled, his voice stronger than it had been since his return from the harbor. "Are you trying to kill me, woman?""If I mean to kill someone, I do it," Rosethorn told him. "I don't try.

When a theological world view dominated, deviance was sin; when the nation-states emerged from the decay of feudalism, most deviance became designated as crime; and in our own scientifically oriented world, various forms of deviance are designated increasingly as medical problems. Thus we view the medical paradigm as the ascending paradigm for deviance designations in our postindustrial society.

Medicine no doubt, has helped us a lot to cure so many diseases, but death still remains an incurable one!

Sometimes it all becomes too much. Your body and mind will just give way. Part of you may want to blissfully fade into nothing, but you never do. After a while all the memories and emotions make you shut down but never fully disappear—it’s safer for you this way, to be excluded. It’s a time to be alone, to heal, and to find yourself. It doesn’t mean you’ve given up or stopped trying; it just means you know what’s best for you.Breathing is medicine. I forgot how to breathe, but I’m learning all over again.

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.

I've got to tell you that my vocation, my true calling, is serving others. Medicine is my avocation; it's part of how I answer my calling, but it's not all of it. I minister to bodies, but I also minister to hearts and souls.