39 Inspiring Medicine Quotes

In the realm of medicine, where science meets the art of healing, words often hold the power to inspire and motivate both practitioners and patients alike. Whether they come from pioneering doctors, renowned philosophers, or enthusiastic patients, these quotes capture the essence of medicine's transformative journey. Embark on a reflective exploration as we unveil a curated collection of 39 inspiring medicine quotes, each offering a unique perspective on healing, empathy, and the profound impact of medical care on human lives. Let these words ignite your passion and deepen your understanding of the intricate dance between knowledge and compassion in the world of medicine.

1. “Flowers always make people better, happier, and more helpful; they are sunshine, food and medicine to the mind.” - Luther Burbank

2. “The art of medicine consists of amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.” - Voltaire

3. “Literature is a virus.” - Corey Redekop

4. “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

5. “A medicine cat has no time for doubt. Put your energy into today and stop worrying about the past.” - Erin Hunter

6. “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

7. “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

8. “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

9. “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

10. “Surgeons can cut out everything except cause.” - Herbert M Shelton

11. “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

12. “After you find out all the things that can go wrong, your life becomes less about living and more about waiting.” - Chuck Palahniuk

13. “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

14. “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

15. “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

16. “The patient is the one with the disease” - Samuel Shem

17. “The physician should not treat the disease but the patient who is suffering from it” - Moses Maimonides

18. “هل كنت تظن أن الطب يقتصر على فحص المريض ، وكتابة الدواء ، والتباهي بالرداء الأبيض ؟ الطب الحقيقي أعمق من ذلك بكثير ، إنه التعامل مع الإنسان بكل ما في هذه الكلمات من المعاني والظلال” - أيمن أسعد عبده

19. “Though the doctors treated him, let his blood, and gave him medications to drink, he nevertheless recovered.” - Leo Tolstoy

20. “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

21. “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

22. “Don't you remember that love, like medicine, is only the art of encouraging nature?” - Pierre A.F. Choderlos de Laclos

23. “...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

24. “The choice is yours: trust the government or trust Mother Nature.” - John Cannell, MD

25. “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

26. “Natural,my ass! The worst poison known to man comes from a tree frog in South America. You cannot imagine how small an amount would be necessary to kill you.and it's natural.Calling something NATURAL is a MEANINGLESS MARKETING PLOY." "All right,calm down! Maybe I like alternative medicine because it's been in use for more than six thousand years.After all that time,they have to know what they're doing.""You mean the wacky idea that somehow in the distant past people had more scientific wisdom than they do today?That's both crazy and counterintuitive.Six thousand years ago people thought thunder was a bunch of gods moving around furniture."-Conversation btw Dr.Jack Stapleton and Vinnie” - Robin Cook

27. “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

28. “The standard treatments for cancer are not meant to heal, but to destroy.” - Andreas Moritz

29. “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

30. “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

31. “A story-a true story-can heal as much as medicine can.” - Eben Alexander

32. “Gratitude is medicine for a heart devastated by tragedy.  If you can only be thankful for the blue sky, then do so.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

33. “..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

34. “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

35. “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.” - Ernest Hemingway

36. “My top priority is for people to understand that they have the power to change things themselves.” - Aung San Suu Kyi

37. “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

38. “Those who do scientific or medical studies and have conclusions are reflecting the results preferred by those who pay them.” - Richard Diaz

39. “You see, when medicine works, it is blessed science, and when it fails, it is witchcraft. - Polidori” - Kenneth Oppel