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Medicine Quotes

61 quotes about medicine. Every quote shows where it comes from and how far to trust it.

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So modern 'pothecaries, taught the art
By doctor's bills to play the doctor's part,
Bold in the practice of mistaken rules,
Prescribe, apply, and call their masters fools.

Alexander Pope An Essay on Criticism (1709)

If thou couldst, doctor, cast
The water of my land, find her disease,
And purge it to a sound and pristine health,
I would applaud thee to the very echo,
That should applaud again.

William Shakespeare Macbeth (1605)

Even as a surgeon, minding off to cut
Some cureless limb,—before in ure he put
His violent engins on the vicious member,
Bringeth his patient in a senseless slumber,
And grief-less then (guided by use and art),
To save the whole, sawes off th' infested part.

Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas La Semaine; ou, Création du monde (1578)

So liv'd our sires, ere doctors learn'd to kill,
And multiplied with theirs the weekly bill.

John Dryden

You tell your doctor, that y' are ill
And what does he, but write a bill,
Of which you need not read one letter,
The worse the scrawl, the dose the better.
For if you knew but what you take,
Though you recover, he must break.

Matthew Prior

But, when the wit began to wheeze,
And wine had warm'd the politician,
Cur'd yesterday of my disease,
I died last night of my physician.

Matthew Prior

Of course there were no miracles to be had, except of the modest kind permitted by the exigencies of medicine and time.

Alastair Reynolds Poseidon's Wake (2015)

Aristotle him selfe sayeth, that medicines be no meate to lyue withall.

Roger Ascham Toxophilus (1545)

The future of medicine is safe in your hands.

Ernst Chain

Consciousness, to be sure, is more effective than packets of medicine.

Mirra Alfassa

The medicine of Sushruta is considerably older than the ninth century; and the grammar of Panini probably precedes Christianity.

Pāṇini

A new drug takes some 10 to 20 years and around US$1 billion to US$2 billion to develop.

Li Chia-wei Li Chia-wei (2020)

If you're a bad actor, you don't get hired. But if you're a bad doctor, you can still practice medicine.

Richard Burton

I would suggest that the whole imposing edifice of modern medicine, for all its breathtaking successes is, like the celebrated Tower of Pisa, slightly off balance.

Charles III

A man cannot have a better guide than himself, nor any physic better than a regular life.

Luigi Cornaro

The tendency toward mysticism is ingrained in human nature. Superstition, religion, and medicine have made their long journey together, and even now are unable to let go of one another's hands.

Sherwin B. Nuland The Mysteries Within (2000)

Modern medicine is a negation of health. It isn’t organised to serve human health, but only itself, as an institution. It makes more people sick than it heals.

Ivan Illich Medical Nemesis (1976)

"As a doctor, I do appreciate my limitations, and I pray a lot. Some things are beyond me, and if I’m not able to do anything, we let God’s will be done."

Catherine Nyongesa

A doctor in rural South Africa describes his frustration. He says, "We have no medicines. Many hospitals tell people, you've got AIDS, we can't help you. Go home and die." In an age of miraculous medicines, no person should have to hear those words.

George W. Bush

He didn’t look all right to me. “Has anyone gone for the doctor?”
“Marse Tom don’t hardly get Doc West for ague. He says all the doc knows is bleeding and blistering and purging and puking and making folks sicker than they was to start.”

Octavia Butler Kindred (1979)

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