Martin H. Fischer

A doctor must work eighteen hours a day and seven days a week. If you cannot console yourself to this, get out of the profession.

Martin Henry Fischer (10 November 1879 – 19 January 1962) was a German-born American physician and author.

General sources

• You must learn to talk clearly. The jargon of scientific terminology which rolls off your tongues is mental garbage.
  • As quoted in ‪Encore : A Continuing Anthology‬ (December 1943) edited by Smith Dent, "Fischerisms" p. 709

• A conclusion is the place where you got tired thinking.
  • As quoted in ‪Encore : A Continuing Anthology‬ (March 1945) edited by Smith Dent, "Fischerisms" p. 309

• Knowledge is a process of piling up facts; wisdom lies in their simplification.
  • As quoted in ‪Encore : A Continuing Anthology‬ (March 1945) edited by Smith Dent, "Fischerisms" p. 309

• A machine has value only as it produces more than it consumes — so check your value to the community.
  • As quoted in Quote Unquote (A Handbook of Quotations) (2005) by M. P. Singh, p. 86

Fischerisms (1944)

Edited by Howard Fabing and Ray Marr

• A doctor must work eighteen hours a day and seven days a week. If you cannot console yourself to this, get out of the profession.

• " Any man who does not make himself proficient in at least two languages other than his own is a fool"

• A good teacher must know the rules; a good pupil, the exceptions.

• Diagnosis is not the end, but the beginning of practice.

• Don't despise empiric truth. Lots of things work in practice for which the laboratory has never found proof.

• Facts are not science — as the dictionary is not literature.

• Here's good advice for practice: go into partnership with nature; she does more than half the work and asks none of the fee.

• The great doctors all got their education off dirt pavements and poverty — not marble floors and foundations.

• The specialist is a man who fears other subjects.

• None of the great discoveries was made by a "specialist" or a "researcher".

• Research has been called good business, a necessity, a gamble, a game. It is none of these — it's a state of mind.

• There is only one reason why men become addicted to drugs — they are weak men. Only strong men are cured, and they cure themselves.

• When a man lacks mental balance in pneumonia he is said to be delirious. When he lacks mental balance without the pneumonia, he is pronounced insane by all smart doctors.

• Whenever ideas fail, men invent words.