Medicine has always been a field fueled by passion, dedication, and the relentless pursuit of healing. Throughout history, countless physicians, scientists, and patients have shared words of wisdom that capture the essence of this noble profession. In this collection, we bring you 116 inspiring medicine quotes that celebrate the art and science of healing, offering motivation and insight for healthcare professionals and anyone touched by the world of medicine. Whether you’re seeking encouragement, reflection, or simply a fresh perspective, these quotes are sure to inspire.
1. “Declare the past, diagnose the present, foretell the future.” - Hippocrates
2. “Swords, Lances, arrows, machine guns, and even high explosives have had far less power over the fates of nations than the typhus louse, the plague flea, and the yellow-fever mosquito. Civilizations have retreated from the plasmodium of malaria, and armies have crumbled into rabbles under the onslaught of cholera spirilla, or of dysentery and typhoid bacilli. Huge areas have bee devastated by the trypanosome that travels on the wings of the tsetse fly, and generations have been harassed by the syphilis of a courtier. War and conquest and that herd existence which is an accompaniment of what we call civilization have merely set the stage for these more powerful agents of human tragedy.” - Hans Zinsser
3. “Wherever the art of Medicine is loved, there is also a love of Humanity. ” - Hippocrates
4. “Flowers always make people better, happier, and more helpful; they are sunshine, food and medicine to the mind.” - Luther Burbank
5. “In the words of the philosopher Sceptum, the founder of my profession: am I going to get paid for this?” - Terry Pratchett
6. “We look for medicine to be an orderly field of knowledge and procedure. But it is not. It is an imperfect science, an enterprise of constantly changing knowledge, uncertain information, fallible individuals, and at the same time lives on the line. There is science in what we do, yes, but also habit, intuition, and sometimes plain old guessing. The gap between what we know and what we aim for persists. And this gap complicates everything we do.” - Atul Gawande
7. “Always laugh when you can, it is cheap medicine.” - Lord Byron
8. “Let us be the ones who say we do not accept that a child dies every three seconds simply because he does not have the drugs you and I have. Let us be the ones to say we are not satisfied that your place of birth determines your right for life. Let us be outraged, let us be loud, let us be bold.” - Brad Pitt
9. “The art of medicine consists of amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.” - Voltaire
10. “Isn’t it a bit unnerving that doctors call what they do “practice”?” - George Carlin
11. “On the day I swore to uphold the Hippocratic oath, the small hairs on the back of my neck stood up as I waited for lightning to strike. Who was I, vowing calmly among all these necktied young men to steal life out of nature's jaws, every old time we got half a chance and a paycheck?... I could not accept the contract: that every child born human upon this earth comes with a guarantee of perfect health and old age clutched in its small fist.” - Barbara Kingsolver
12. “Despite all my public misconduct, in the past year, I had learned the Elemental spells, the Doppelschläferin, and the preparation and flying of a magic broom; I had survived two months as prisoner of war, saving the life of captain Johanne in the process; I had escaped the dungeons of Fortress Drachensbett, and after an arduous journey successfully reunited with my double, so preserving her, and all Montagne, from Prince Flonian's rapacity, I would somehow master the despicable art of being a princess.” - Catherine Gilbert Murdock
13. “no disease suffered by a live man can be known, for every living person has his own peculiarities and always has his own peculiar, personal, novel, complicated disease, unknown to medicine -- not a disease of the lungs, liver, skin, heart, nerves, and so on mentioned in medical books, but a disease consisting of one of the innumerable combinations of the maladies of those organs. This simple thought could not occur to the doctors (as it cannot occur to a wizard that he is unable to work his charms) because the business of their lives was to cure, and they received money for it and had spent the best years of their lives on that business. But above all that thought was kept out of their minds by the fact that they saw they were really useful [...] Their usefulness did not depend on making the patient swallow substances for the most part harmful (the harm was scarcely perceptible because they were given in small doses) but they were useful, necessary, and indispensable because they satisfied a mental need of the invalid and those who loved her -- and that is why there are, and always will be, pseudo-healers, wise women, homoeopaths, and allopaths. They satisfied that eternal human need for hope of relief, for sympathy, and that something should be done, which is felt by those who are suffering.” - Leo Tolstoy
14. “Betterment is perpetual labor. The world is chaotic, disorganized, and vexing, and medicine is nowhere spared that reality. To complicate matters, we in medicine are also only human ourselves. We are distractible, weak, and given to our own concerns. Yet still, to live as a doctor is to live so that one's life is bound up in others' and in science and in the messy, complicated connection between the two It is to live a life of responsibility. The question then, is not whether one accepts the responsibility. Just by doing this work, one has. The question is, having accepted the responsibility, how one does such work well.” - Atul Gawande
15. “A medicine cat has no time for doubt. Put your energy into today and stop worrying about the past.” - Erin Hunter
16. “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.” - Thomas Szasz
17. “I emphasize this because some of my colleagues, for whose academic attainments I have great respect, argue" 'You assume too much; this is not proved; this is not strictly scientific. We disagree with your neurology and your psychiatry is misleading, therefore you must be wrong.' My reply has been, with all humility: 'Yes, of course,' and I have returned to the labor ward to be greeted by happy women with their newborn babies in their arms: 'How right you are, Doctor, it is so much easier that way.' That is what really matters to the clinician. He should use the method that gives the best and safest result from all points of view until something better is discovered.” - Grantly Dick-Read
18. “As to diseases, make a habit of two things — to help, or at least, to do no harm.” - Hippocrates
19. “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.” - Tamora Pierce
20. “Medicine is my lawful wife, and literature is my mistress. When I get fed up with one, I spend the night with the other” - Anton Chekhov
21. “Hospitals should be arranged in such a way as to make being sick an interesting experience. One learns a great deal sometimes from being sick. ” - Alan Wilson Watts
22. “Los científicos e individuos de finales del siglo veinte son altamente creyentes, tanto como los científicos de antaño, lo único que ha cambiado es el objeto de su fe, los tradicionales creían en principios universales que regían el cosmos visible e invisible, enseñanzas y técnicas trasmitidas de generación en generación por hombres que se dedicaban a la concentración, la meditación y el estudio, que vivían en el bosque o en monasterios y templos apartados del dinero y del ruido. Los científicos actuales creen con la misma intensidad que sus antepasados, pero no en esos principios metafísicos y universales que les parecen supercherías, sino en el poder de medicaciones químicas, aunque se retiren años después; en el poder de protección de vacunas y antibióticos... en el poder del dinero para crear la realidad más falsa de todas por definición... y en definitiva en el Sistema que es quien les ha creado, quien les mantiene y el que un día les fagocitará.” - Dr. Enrique Costa Vercher
23. “I don't understand why asking people to eat a well-balanced vegetarian diet is considered drastic, while it is medically conservative to cut people open and put them on cholesterol lowering drugs for the rest of their lives.” - Dean Ornish
24. “The greatest disease in the West today is not TB or leprosy; it is being unwanted, unloved, and uncared for. We can cure physical diseases with medicine, but the only cure for loneliness, despair, and hopelessness is love. There are many in the world who are dying for a piece of bread but there are many more dying for a little love. The poverty in the West is a different kind of poverty -- it is not only a poverty of loneliness but also of spirituality. There's a hunger for love, as there is a hunger for God.” - Mother Teresa
25. “Eunuchs do not take the gout, nor become bald.” - Hippocrates & Galen
26. “Be sceptical, ask questions, demand proof. Demand evidence. Don't take anything for granted. But here's the thing: When you get proof, you need to accept the proof. And we're not that good at doing that.” - Michael Specter
27. “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 prayed a lot. I hoped hard, I wished hard, but I didn't pray. I had developed a certain distrust of organized religion growing up, but I felt I had the capacity to be a spiritual person, and to hold some fervent beliefs. Quite simply, I believed I had a responsibility to be a good person, and that meant fair, honest, hardworking, and honorable. If I did that, if I was good to my family, true to my friends, if I gave back to my community or to some cause, if I wasn't a liar, a cheat, or a thief, then I believed that should be enough. At the end of the day, if there was indeed some Body or presence standing there to judge me, I hoped I would be judged on whether I had lived a true life, not on whether I believed in a certain book, or whether I'd been baptized. If there was indeed a God at the end of my days, I hoped he didn't say, 'But you were never a Christian, so you're going the other way from heaven.' If so, I was going to reply, 'You know what? You're right. Fine.'I believed, too, in the doctors and the medicine and the surgeries--I believed in that. I believed in them. A person like Dr. Einhorn [his oncologist], that's someone to believe in, I thought, a person with the mind to develop an experimental treatment 20 years ago that now could save my life. I believed in the hard currency of his intelligence and his research.Beyond that, I had no idea where to draw the line between spiritual belief and science. But I knew this much: I believed in belief, for its own shining sake. To believe in the face of utter hopelessness, every article of evidence to the contrary, to ignore apparent catastrophe--what other choice was there? We do it every day, I realized. We are so much stronger than we imagine, and belief is one of the most valiant and long-lived human characteristics. To believe, when all along we humans know that nothing can cure the briefness of this life, that there is no remedy for our basic mortality, that is a form of bravery.To continue believing in yourself, believing in the doctors, believing in the treatment, believing in whatever I chose to believe in, that was the most important thing, I decided. It had to be.Without belief, we would be left with nothing but an overwhelming doom, every single day. And it will beat you. I didn't fully see, until the cancer, how we fight every day against the creeping negatives of the world, how we struggle daily against the slow lapping of cynicism. Dispiritedness and disappointment, these were the real perils of life, not some sudden illness or cataclysmic millennium doomsday. I knew now why people fear cancer: because it is a slow and inevitable death, it is the very definition of cynicism and loss of spirit.So, I believed.” - Lance Armstrong
28. “Surgeons can cut out everything except cause.” - Herbert M Shelton
29. “Better to forget, better to let go of the bitterness. I say bitterness is only good in medicine, or if you fry bitter gourd with egg, then it's dlicious. I told Lan-Lan many times, we have only one life, it's important to kua kwee, to look spaciously. Not keep the eyes so narrowed down to the small dispairs.Those people who say forgive and forget, I say they not right. Not so simple. I say, find right medicine. Bitterness must be just right for problem. Then swallow it, think of good things can do when no longer sick.” - Lydia Kwa
30. “When you got a condition, it's bad to forget your medicine.” - Frank Miller
31. “Good medicine always tastes bad.” - Ron Hall
32. “After you find out all the things that can go wrong, your life becomes less about living and more about waiting.” - Chuck Palahniuk
33. “Failing to listen to the woman is one of the biggest mistakes a practitioner can make.” - Helen Varney
34. “Homeopathy pills are, after all, empty little sugar pills which seem to work, and so they embody [..] how we can be misled into thinking that any intervention is more effective than it really is.” - Ben Goldacre
35. “The life so short, the craft so long to learn.” - Hippocrates
36. “In my opinion, our health care system has failed when a doctor fails to treat an illness that is treatable.” - Kevin Alan Lee
37. “You are a placebo responder. Your body plays tricks on your mind. You cannot be trusted.” - Ben Goldacre
38. “Time and time again, throughout the history of medical practice, what was once considered as "scientific" eventually becomes regarded as "bad practice".” - David Stewart
39. “In 1736 I lost one of my sons, a fine boy of four years old, by the small-pox, taken in the common way. I long regretted bitterly, and still regret that I had not given it to him by inoculation. This I mention for the sake of parents who omit that operation, on the supposition that they should never forgive themselves if a child died under it; my example showing that the regret may be the same either way, and that, therefore, the safer should be chosen.” - Benjamin Franklin
40. “Doctors most commonly get mixed up between absence of evidence and evidence of abense” - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
41. “It is very expensive to give bad medical care to poor people in a rich country.” - Paul Farmer
42. “I've been asked a lot for my view on American health care. Well, 'it would be a good idea,' to quote Gandhi.” - Paul Farmer
43. “The abscess is a distant memory. The pain is gone. This dinner with her hosts and her health-care team, this week of seeing another country and another culture, this time of being in demand, this moment is reality. I am a lucky girl, (Judy) thinks.” - Shireen Jeejeebhoy
44. “There are times in my life when I have been medicine for some while poison for others. I used to think I was a victim of my story until I realized the truth; that I am the creator of my story. I choose what type of person I will be and what type of impact I will leave on others. I will never choose the destructive path of self and outward victimization again.” - Steve Maraboli
45. “..my music isn't just music- its medicine.” - Kanye West
46. “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.” - Kurt Vonnegut
47. “She handed him a glass of water and two Aleve gelcaps. “They’re anti-inflammatories. They will dull the pain a little bit and keep down swelling and redness. Swallow the pills, don’t chew.”“Well, I thought I’d stick them into my nose and impersonate a walrus, but if you insist, I’ll swallow them.” - Ilona Andrews
48. “Gomers are human beings who have lost what goes into being human beings. They want to die, and we will not let them.” - Samuel Shem
49. “A BMS hears hoofbeats outside his window, the first thing he thinks of is a zebra” - Samuel Shem
50. “To do nothing for the gomers was to do something, and the more conscientiously I did nothing the better they got.” - Samuel Shem
51. “At a cardiac arrest, the first procedure is to take your own pulse” - Samuel Shem
52. “وسمع في رأسه صدى كلام استاذه الكندي د/تومسون الذي كان يردد دائما (الكلام مع المريض علم وفن، يحتاج الى الكثير من الخبرة والمهارة ؛ولذلك يتفاوت الأطباء فيه.عليك اولا ان تتفهم المريض وعائلته ،مامستوى التعليم عندهم ؟كيف ترابطهم في الأسره؟هل هم من النوع القلق ؟هل هم من النوع الذي يحب التفاصيل؟وبعد جمع أكبر قدر من المعلومات عمن امامك،تفصّل له جرعة المعلومات التي تعطيه إياها وطريقة اعطاء المعلومات وكأنك تكتب له جرعة الدواء الذي تعطيه وطريقة اعطائه)” - أيمن أسعد عبده
53. “The physician should not treat the disease but the patient who is suffering from it” - Moses Maimonides
54. “I am rather disturbed by the fact that so many people—who are neither medical professionals nor trans themselves—would want to hear all of the gory details regarding transsexual physical transformations, or would feel that they have any right to ask us about the state of our genitals.” - Julia Serano
55. “Until fairly recently, every family had a cornucopia of favorite home remedies--plants and household items that could be prepared to treat minor medical emergencies, or to prevent a common ailment becoming something much more serious. Most households had someone with a little understanding of home cures, and when knowledge fell short, or more serious illness took hold, the family physician or village healer would be called in for a consultation, and a treatment would be agreed upon. In those days we took personal responsibility for our health--we took steps to prevent illness and were more aware of our bodies and of changes in them. And when illness struck, we frequently had the personal means to remedy it. More often than not, the treatment could be found in the garden or the larder. In the middle of the twentieth century we began to change our outlook. The advent of modern medicine, together with its many miracles, also led to a much greater dependency on our physicians and to an increasingly stretched healthcare system. The growth of the pharmaceutical industry has meant that there are indeed "cures" for most symptoms, and we have become accustomed to putting our health in the hands of someone else, and to purchasing products that make us feel good. Somewhere along the line we began to believe that technology was in some way superior to what was natural, and so we willingly gave up control of even minor health problems.” - Karen Sullivan
56. “This (...) had made me aware for the first time of the well-disguised myth that they and the academic institutions they represent are bastions of a free exchange of ideas. They are -but only of those ideas that don't 'rock the boat', that refrain from challenging hallowed taboos.” - Jack Kevorkian
57. “Though the doctors treated him, let his blood, and gave him medications to drink, he nevertheless recovered.” - Leo Tolstoy
58. “Emblematic of this era was the prolific Viennese surgeon Theodor Billroth. Born in 1821, Billroth studied music and surgery with almost equal verve. (The professions still often go hand in hand. Both push manual skill to its limit; both mature with practice and age; both depend on immediacy, precision, and opposable thumbs.)” - Siddhartha Mukherjee
59. “Presque tous les hommes meurent de leurs remèdes, et non pas de leurs maladies.” - Molière
60. “Health and disease are the same thing—vital action intended to preserve, maintain, and protect the body. There is no more reason for treating disease than there is for treating health.” - Herbert M Shelton
61. “Just like your body and lifestyle can be healthy or unhealthy, the same is true with your beliefs. Your beliefs can be your medicine or your poison.” - Steve Maraboli
62. “I welcomed my slavish existence as a surgical resident, the never-ending work, the cries that kept me in the present, the immersion in blood, pus, and tears -- the fluids in which one dissolved all traces of self. In working myself ragged, I felt integrated...” - Abraham Verghese
63. “The conditions necessary for devastating epidemics or pandemics just didn't exist until the agricultural revolution. The claim that modern medicine and sanitation save us from infectious diseases that ravaged pre-agricultural people (something we hear often) is like arguing that seat belts and air bags protect us from car crashes that were fatal to our prehistoric ancestors.” - Cacilda Jethá
64. “I am diagnosed with not having enough insanely-addictive drugs coursing through my body.” - Sarah Silverman
65. “There is no such thing as an infallible doctor.” - Edward E. Rosenbaum
66. “Doctors are great--as long as you don't need them.” - Edward E. Rosenbaum
67. “At one time, the treatment for a certain kind of psychosis had been to push an ice pick up through the orbit of the eye, into the frontal lobe; the ice pick was then stirred around until it reduced the problematic brain tissue to non-functioning porridge.” - Alastair Reynolds
68. “Modern allopathic medicine is the only major science stuck in the pre-Einstein era.” - Charlotte Gerson
69. “Healing is a biological process, not an art. It is as much a function of the living organism as respiration, digestion, circulation, excretion, cell proliferation, or nerve activity. It is a ceaseless process, as constant as the turning of the earth on its axis. Man can neither duplicate nor imitate nor provide a substitute for the process. All schools of healing are frauds.” - Herbert M Shelton
70. “Believing is half the cure.” - Toba Beta
71. “الطب بلا إنسانيه كالصلاة بلا وضوء” - د طه الدرازي
72. “Seeing modern health care from the other side, I can say that it is clearly not set up for the patient. It is frequently a poor arrangement for doctors as well, but that does not mitigate how little the system accounts for the patient's best interest. Just when you are at your weakest and least able to make all the phone calls, traverse the maze of insurance, and plead for health-care referrals is that one time when you have to your life may depend on it.” - Ross Donaldson
73. “Don't you remember that love, like medicine, is only the art of encouraging nature?” - Pierre A.F. Choderlos de Laclos
74. “...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.” - Michelle Au
75. “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.” - John Cannell, MD
76. “The choice is yours: trust the government or trust Mother Nature.” - John Cannell, MD
77. “People underestimate the importance of dilligence as a virtue. No doubt it has something to do with how supremely mundane it seems. It is defined as "the constant and earnest effort to accomplish what is undertaken."... Understood, however, as the prerequisite of great accomplishment, diligence stands as one of the most difficult challenges facing any group of people who take on tasks of risk and consequence. It sets a high, seemingly impossible, expectation for performance and human behavior.” - Atul Gawande
78. “You cannot separate passion from pathology any more than you can separate a person's spirit from his body.” - Richard Selzer
79. “Medicine is a golden goose that has to be killed because every time the goose lays a golden egg, someone gets sick or dead.” - Richard Diaz
80. “Doctors is all swabs.” - Robert Louis Stevenson
81. “A new doctor had been sent for, Lazzaro of Pavia, who had administered to Lorenzo a pulverized mixture of diamonds and pearls. This hitherto infallible medicine had failed to help.” - Irving Stone
82. “We'd been assured it wouldn't be painful, though she might experience 'discomfort,' a term beloved of the medical profession that seems to be a synonym for agony that isn't yours.” - Lionel Shriver
83. “I'm sorry, 'herbal medicine', "Oh, herbal medicine's been around for thousands of years!" Indeed it has, and then we tested it all, and the stuff that worked became 'medicine'. And the rest of it is just a nice bowl of soup and some potpourri, so knock yourselves out.” - Dara O'Briain
84. “It is an odd thing that you can easily get millions of pounds for weapons to destroy life, but it is exceedingly difficult to get thousands for weapons to preserve it.” - James Harpole
85. “The standard treatments for cancer are not meant to heal, but to destroy.” - Andreas Moritz
86. “I love the imagery of struggle. I sometimes wish I were suffering in a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instead of just being a gravely endangered patient. Allow me to inform you, though, that when you sit in a room with a set of other finalists, and kindly people bring a huge transparent bag of poison and plug it into your arm, and you either read or don't read a book while the venom sack gradually empties itself into your system, the image of the ardent solider is the very last one that will occur to you. You feel swamped with passivity and impotence: dissolving in powerlessness like a sugar lump in water.” - Christopher Hitchens
87. “Basch: So why don't you ask her out?The Runt: I'm scared she wouldn't like me and say no.-So what? What have you got to lose?-The possibility -if she says no- that she might have said yes. Whatever I do, I don't want to lose that possibility.” - Samuel Shem
88. “The food you eat can be either the safest and most powerful form of medicine or the slowest form of poison.” - Ann Wigmore
89. “Tell us please, what treatment in an emergency is administered by ear?"....I met his gaze and I did not blink. "Words of comfort," I said to my father.” - Abraham Verghese
90. “I am not sure,' Mordecai told Thomas, 'whether omens can be trusted.''Of course they can.''I should like to hear your reasons. But show me your urine first.''You said I was cured,' Thomas protested. 'Eternal vigilance, dear Thomas, is the price of health. Piss for me.” - Bernard Cornwell
91. “Certainly the primary imperative of a physician is to be skilled in medical science, but if he or she does not probe a patient's soul, then the doctor's care is given without caring, and part of the sacred mission of healing is missing.” - Jerome E. Groopman
92. “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?” - Michael J. Collins
93. “In more ancient times the life was simpler, but now the discovery of all these different medicines for curing dyspepsia shows that people are suffering from this disease. In this country we know that there are so many kinds of pills and medicines used. We even have those in India now. These things show that not only in America but in all the countries of the world we have to recourse to artificial means for necessary nutrients because people are not aware of right rules of diet. It is better to follow the right rules of diet in the beginning in order to avoid any kind of artificial medicines later on.” - Virchand Raghavji Gandhi
94. “[American ambulance crews] salvaged people we'd never see in Missing, because no one would have tied to bring them to a hospital. Judging someone to be beyond help never crossed the minds of police, firemen, or doctors here.” - Abraham Verghese
95. “Surely you couldn't be a good doctor and a terrible human being---surely the laws of man, if not God, didn't allow it.” - Abraham Verghese
96. “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, and who almost always smells unusually clean and good--approaches any psych patient under this care with a professional manner somewhere between bland and deep, a distant but sincere concern that's divided evenly between the patient's subjective discomfort and the hard facts of the case.” - David Foster Wallace
97. “It must be dawn, and the last breath went out of this body on the table - how long before? Irretrievably gone from this world, as dead as though she had lived a thousand years ago. Men have cut the isthmus of Panama and joined the two oceans; they have bored tunnels that run below rivers; built aluminum planes that fly from Frisco to Manila; sent music over the air and photographs over wires; but never, when the heartbeat of their own kind has once stopped, never when the spark of life has fled, have they been able to reanimate the mortal clay with that commonest yet most mysterious of all processes; the vital force. And this man thinks he can - this man alone, out of all the world's teeming billions! ("Jane Brown's Body")” - Cornell Woolrich
98. “كل المستشفيات كئيبة, و إن حسنت خدمتها و غليت أسعارها و نضفت أروقتها. لكن مستشفيات الففراء في بلادنا ليست كئيبة, بل حقيرة. و الكآبة يمكن احتمالها, أما الحقارة فلا يجوز احتمالها.” - بلال فضل
99. “Popular medicine and popular morality belong together and ought not to be evaluated so differently as they still are: both are the most dangerous pseudo-sciences.” - Friedrich Nietzsche
100. “Before the counter-culture revolutionary Li Lian was executed in 1971 for criticising the Cultural Revolution, pour policemen pushed her face against the window of a truck, lifted her shirt and cut out her kidneys with a surgical knife,’ Mau Sen said, his face stony and white. ‘I think that removing the organs of convicts while they are still alive is too much. It completely contravenes medical ethics.’ ‘This is a dissection class, not a political meeting,’ Sun Chunlin said.” - Ma Jian
101. “Les gens bien portants sont des malades qui s'ignorent.” - Jules Romains
102. “Unreason is an essential medicine as long as you do not overdose.” - Dean Koontz
103. “A story-a true story-can heal as much as medicine can.” - Eben Alexander
104. “Spanish rain,A maiden’s dress,Apothecary pillsAnd ancient thrills;Melancholy killsA girl’s caress.(—Roman Payne; Valencia, Spain, November 2nd 2012)” - Roman Payne
105. “..I don't count Jennifer among my mistakes. She had a severe infection and precious little reserve. Nevertheless, I think of her often. Those minutes of terror and confusion I felt standing powerless in her room served as a visceral reminder throughout my training... that the big picture isn't enough in medicine...” - Lisa Sanders
106. “In the spring of 2009, I was the 217th person ever to be diagnosed with anti-NMDA-receptor autoimmune encephalitis. Just a year later, that figure had doubled. Now the number is in the thousands. Yet Dr. Bailey, considered one of the best neurologists in the country, had never heard of it. When we live in a time when the rate of misdiagnoses has shown no improvement since the 1930s, the lesson here is that it’s important to always get a second opinion.While he may be an excellent doctor in many respects, Dr. Bailey is also, in some ways, a perfect example of what is wrong with medicine. I was just a number to him (and if he saw thirty-five patients a day, as he told me, that means I was one of a very large number). He is a by-product of a defective system that forces neurologists to spend five minutes with X number of patients a day to maintain their bottom line. It’s a bad system. Dr. Bailey is not the exception to the rule. He is the rule.” - Susannah Cahalan
107. “The only mistake you can make is not asking for help.” - Sandeep Jauhar
108. “My top priority is for people to understand that they have the power to change things themselves.” - Aung San Suu Kyi
109. “The health benefits, both mental and physical, of humor are well documented. A good laugh can diffuse tension, relieve stress, and release endorphins into your system, which act as a natural mood elevator. In Norman Cousin's book, Anatomy of an Illness, Cousin's describes the regimen he followed to overcome a serious debilitating disease he was suffering from. It included large doses of laughter and humor. Published in 1976, his book has been widely accepted by the medical community.” - Cherie Carter-Scott
110. “Physicians, patients, and ethicists must also understand that acknowledging abuse and encouraging African Americans to participate in research are compatible goals. History and today's deplorable African American health profile tell us clearly that black Americans need both more research and more vigilance.” - Harriet A. Washington
111. “The disease of the soul is both more common and more deadly than the disease of the body. Just as medicine is the art devoted to healing the body, so philosophy is the art devoted to healing the soul, curing it of improper emotions, false beliefs, and faulty judgments, which are the causes of so much hardship and handicap. To heal the body one turns to the practitioner of the art of healing the body, but to heal the soul there is no doctor to turn to, and each of us is left to become that doctor unto himself. Yet, this need not stop us from exhorting others to imitate us in the godly art, in the forlorn hope that they might transform themselves into better citizens for Athens and better companions for us.” - Neel Burton
112. “Be consistent in your dedication to showing your gratitude to others. Gratitude is a fuel, a medicine, and spiritual and emotional nourishment.” - Steve Maraboli
113. “Those who do scientific or medical studies and have conclusions are reflecting the results preferred by those who pay them.” - Richard Diaz
114. “You see, when medicine works, it is blessed science, and when it fails, it is witchcraft. - Polidori” - Kenneth Oppel
115. “A little toxin is the best tonic.” - David P. Gontar
116. “Eventually it became clear that our emotions, attitudes, and thoughts profoundly affect our bodies, sometimes to the degree of life or death. Soon mind-body effects were recognized to have positive as well as negative impacts on the body. This realization came largely from research on the placebo effect—the beneficial results of suggestion, expectation, and positive thinking.” - Larry Dossey
