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Medicine

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Medicine is the science of caring for a patient, managing the diagnosis, prognosis, prevention, treatment, palliation of their injury or disease, and promoting their health.

Quotes

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Wherever the art of medicine is loved, there also is love of humanity. ~ Hippocrates
The children face problems such as violence, abuse, suicide etc. that medicine can not heal. ~ Osamu Tezuka
  • Change in our views seems to be a phenomenon, and in no science has the maxim: "Much arises which has already perished, and what is now honored is already declining," attained such extended verification as in the very science of medicine. Even so in this same science has been proven the truth of that other saying: "As long at man struggles he errs". To err in its struggles after the truth is, however, according to the resigned expression of Lessing, the portion of humanity, and absolute truth is of God alone.
  • Medicine is a science which hath been... more professed than laboured, and yet more laboured than advanced: the labour having been, in my judgment, rather in circle than in progression. For I find much iteration but small addition. It considereth causes of diseases, with the occasions or impulsions; the diseases themselves, with the accidents; and the cures with the preservations. The deficiencies which I think good to note being a few of many, and those such as are of a more open and manifest nature, I will enumerate, and not place.
    • Francis Bacon, The Proficience and Advancement of Learning Divine and Human, 2nd Book to the King (1605) English Tr. Francis Headlam, translation revised by James Spedding, The Philosophical Works of Francis Bacon (1905) p. 105
  • Our world is one of terrible contradictions. Plenty of food but one billion people go hungry. Lavish lifestyles for a few, but poverty for too many others. Huge advances in medicine while mothers die everyday in childbirth . . . Billions spent on weapons to kill people instead of keeping them safe.
  • I find the medicine worse than the malady.
  • MEDICINE, n. A stone flung down the Bowery to kill a dog in Broadway.
  • Medicine, guarded too by preliminary impediments, and frightful medusa-heads of quackery, which deter many generous souls from entering, is of the half-articulate professions, and does not much invite the ardent kinds of ambition. The intellect required for medicine might be wholly human, and indeed should by all rules be,—the profession of the Human Healer being radically a sacred one and connected with the highest priesthoods, or rather being itself the outcome and acme of all priesthoods, and divinest conquests of intellect here below. As will appear one day, when men take off their old monastic and ecclesiastic spectacles, and look with eyes again! In essence the Physician's task is always heroic, eminently human: but in practice most unluckily at present we find it too become in good part beaverish,—yielding a money-result alone. And what of it is not beaverish,—does not that too go mainly to ingenious talking, publishing of yourself, ingratiating of yourself; a partly human exercise or waste of intellect, and, alas, a partly vulpine ditto;—making the once sacred... Human Healer, more impossible for us than ever!
  • History is replete with examples of what happens when any group of authorities do not have to answer to empirical evidence but are free to define truth as they see fit. None of the examples has a happy ending. Why should it be otherwise with therapy?
    • Robert Todd Carroll, The Skeptic's Dictionary, entry on "repressed memory therapy (RMT)".
  • The doctor of the future will give no medicine, but will instruct his patient in the care of the human frame, in diet and in the cause and prevention of disease.
    • This has been reprinted many times with slight variations on the wording; it is part of a much larger quote directly from Edison published in 1903:
Nineteen hundred and three will bring great advances in surgery, in the study of bacteria, in the knowledge of the cause and prevention of disease. Medicine is played out. Every new discovery of bacteria shows us all the more convincingly that we have been wrong and that the million tons of stuff we have taken was all useless.
The doctor of the future will give no medicine, but will instruct his patient in the care of the human frame, in diet and in the cause and prevention of disease.
They may even discover the germ of old age. I don't predict it, but it might be by the sacrifice of animal life human life could be prolonged.
Surgery, diet, antiseptics — these three are the vital things of the future in preserving the health of humanity. There were never so many able, active minds at work on the problems of diseases as now, and all their discoveries are tending to the simple truth — that you can't improve on nature.
  • Thomas Edison as quoted in "Wizard Edison" in The Newark Advocate (2 January 1903), p. 1 according to research by Barbara and David P. Mikkelson at snopes.com.
  • The ignorance and general incompetency of the average graduate of the American medical Schools, at the time when he receives the degree which turns him loose upon the community, is something horrible to contemplate.
    • Charles Eliot, President of Harvard University (1869). In response to this call for reform, Harvard Professor of Surgery Harold Bigelow replied "He actually proposes to have written examinations for the degree of doctor of medicine. I had to tell him that he knew nothing about the quality of Harvard medical students. More than half of them can barely write. Of course they can't pass written examinations...No medical school has thought it proper to risk large existing classes and larger receipts by introducing more rigorous standards".
  • Medicine is founded upon the nature and constitution of man, physically and psychically, in all his phases of existence, and must necessarily be related to all the sciences, with scarcely an exception; since man is a microcosm of the universe, and science and philosophy are exponents of his relation thereto. This is the foundation of Aristotle's epigrammatic phrase: "The philosopher should end with medicine; the physician commence with philosophy."
    • David Allyn Gorton, The History of Medicine, Philosophical and Critical (1910) Vol. 1
  • From inability to let well alone; from too much zeal for the new and contempt for what is old; from putting knowledge before wisdom, science before art and cleverness before common sense; from treating patients as cases; and from making the cure of the disease more grievous than the endurance of the same, Good Lord, deliver us.
    • Sir Robert Hutchison, 20th century physician, British Medical Journal (1953), 1: 671.
  • Medicine was the foster-mother of Chemistry, because it has to do with the preparation of drugs and the detection of poisons; of Botany, because it enabled the physician to recognize medicinal herbs; of Comparative Anatomy and Physiology, because the man who studied Human Anatomy and Physiology for purely medical purposes was led to extend his studies to the rest of the animal world.
  • 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.
  • Things are not going well for me. My chef at the Charité strongly disapproves of women students and took this means of showing it. About a hundred men (no women except myself) went round the wards today, and when we were all assembled before him to have our names written down, he called and named all the students except me, and then closed the book. I stood forward upon this, and said quietly, "Et moi aussi, monsieur." [And me, Sir.] He turned on me sharply, and cried, "Vous, vous n'êtes ni homme ni femme; je ne veux pas inscrire vôtre nom." [You, you are neither man nor woman; I don't want to write your name.] I stood silent in the midst of a dead silence.
    • Anna Kingsford, written to her husband in 1874; quoted in The Scalpel and the Butterfly by Deborah Rudacille (University of California Press, 2000), p. 35.
  • Before the eighteenth century the demographic impact of the profession of medicine remained negligible. Relatively few persons could afford to pay a doctor for his often very expensive services; and for every case in which the doctor's attendance really made a difference between life and death, there were other instances in which even the best available professional services made little difference to the course of the disease, or actually hindered recovery. ...Only with the eighteenth century did the situation begin to change; and it was not until after 1850 or so that the practice of medicine and the organization of medical services begin to make large-scale differences in human survival rates and population growth.
  • One should distinguish three groups of medicines — life-givers, preservers, and restorers. Let us leave for Our enemies the fourth group — the destroyers. Let us turn our attention to the life-givers, because they act first of all upon the nervous system. The nerve centers and secretions of the glands indicate the future development of medicine. Through these domains humanity will discover the finest energy, which for simplification we still call spirit. The discovery of the emanations of this energy will be the next step in the development of culture.
    • Morya, Agni Yoga, (1929) 42.
  • It is right to desire to explore the foundations of Vedic medicine. In spite of the later changes, the essence of the Vedic medicine remains useful. To each searching investigator the very logic of this medicine provides new perceptions of the properties of plant extracts. Instead of a crude listing of plants and other products of nature, precise information about the properties of the various parts of plants and the conditions of their use leads to more exact conclusions. Attention must also be paid to the conditions of cosmic chemistry. Coming from the most ancient times, these conclusions can bring joy to the present-day observer.
    • Morya, Agni Yoga, (1929) 585.
  • Scientists speaking about the subconscious, about cerebral and nervous reflexes, about animal magnetism, about telepathy, certainly speak of one and the same thing — of psychic energy. But this term is somehow not uttered. These snatches of knowledge beg to be united into one current, but narrow - mindedness prevents the proper relating of these various fragments of knowledge. Pure science is not afraid of alleyways. Attention is being paid now to the study of secretions, and perhaps this particular direction, the investigation of glandular secretions, will call attention to the existence of other secretions. Glandular secretions have only recently attracted attention, although ancient medicine pointed out the importance of secretions long ago. This matter was avoided, although all of nature proclaimed it. Is it possible that dialectics and materialism are only limitations? The development of consciousness brings us into closer contact with the entire mighty energy. Is it possible to think as before, with only half one's brain, not caring about the locked-up treasures?
    • Morya, Agni Yoga, (1929) 601.
  • The popular medical formulation of morality that goes back to Ariston of Chios, "virtue is the health of the soul," would have to be changed to become useful, at least to read: "your virtue is the health of your soul." For there is no health as such, and all attempts to define a thing that way have been wretched failures. Even the determination of what is healthy for your body depends on your goal, your horizon, your energies, your impulses, your errors, and above all on the ideals and phantasms of your soul. Thus there are innumerable healths of the body; and the more we allow the unique and incomparable to raise its head again, and the more we abjure the dogma of the "equality of men," the more must the concept of a normal health, along with a normal diet and the normal course of an illness, be abandoned by medical men. Only then would the time have come to reflect on the health and illness of the soul, and to find the peculiar virtue of each man in the health of his soul.
  • Finally, the great question would still remain whether we can really dispense with illness—even for the sake of our virtue—and whether our thirst for knowledge and self-knowledge in particular does not require the sick soul as much as the healthy, and whether, in brief, the will to health alone, is not a prejudice, cowardice, and perhaps a bit of very subtle barbarism and backwardness.
  • La philosophie est la mére de la médecine.
    • Philosophy is the mother of medecine.
    • Kurt Polycarp Joachim Sprengel Histoire de la Médecine, Depuis son Origine Jusqu'au Dix-neuvième Siècle Tome premier, Introduction p. 5 as quoted by David Allyn Gorton, The History of Medicine, Philosophical and Critical (1910) Vol. 1
  • The children face problems such as violence, abuse, suicide etc. that medicine can not heal. It will never help these children psychologically and be his support ...? Even when they are in difficulty, in principle they do not speak with adults, or confide about their true intentions. However, expect some serious messages from adults. I will continue to send messages through manga. Children avoid them what force or what they want to impose anything. That is why I will continue to look for those things that [...] inspire their hearts.
    • Osamu Tezuka from the intervention to the fifteenth national conference on school health and safety in schools, 1987; quoted in AA.VV., Osamu Tezuka: A Manga Biography, vol. 2, translated by Marta Fogato, Coconino Press, Bologna, 2001, p. 79. ISBN 8888063072
  • Anatomical drawing was at one time considered essential for both medical and art students, and while many exhibitions have explored the role of artists illustrating anatomy, it is rare to find much acknowledgment of doctors' draughtsmanship in the history of medical training.

Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations

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Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 502-04.
  • Medicus carat, Natura sanat morbus.
    • The physician heals, Nature makes well.
    • Idea in Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book VII. 15. 7. Oxford text.
  • A man's own observation, what he find good of, and what he finds hurt of, is the best physic to preserve health.
  • Dat Galenus opes, dat Justinianus honores,
    Sed genus species cogitur ire pedes.
    • The rich Physician, honor'd Lawyers ride,
      Whil'st the poor Scholar foots it by their side.
    • Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), I. 2. 3. 15. Quoted by Dr. Robert F. Arnold. A like saying may be found in Franciscus Floridus Sabinus—Lectiones Subcisive, Book I, Chapter I. Also John Owen—Medicus et I. C.
    • Ovid, Fasti, I. 217; Amores, III, VIII. 55.
  • 'Tis not amiss, ere ye're giv'n o'er,
    To try one desp'rate med'cine more;
    For where your case can be no worse,
    The desp'rat'st is the wisest course.
  • Learn'd he was in medic'nal lore,
    For by his side a pouch he wore,
    Replete with strange hermetic powder
    That wounds nine miles point-blank would solder.
  • This is the way that physicians mend or end us,
    Secundum artem: but although we sneer
    In health—when ill, we call them to attend us,
    Without the least propensity to jeer.
  • Ægri quia non omnes convalescunt, idcirco ars nulla medicina est.
    • Because all the sick do not recover, therefore medicine is not an art.
    • Cicero, De Natura Deorum, II. 4.
  • Take a little rum
    The less you take the better,
    Pour it in the lakes
    Of Wener or of Wetter.

    Dip a spoonful out
    And mind you don't get groggy,
    Pour it in the lake
    Of Winnipissiogie.

    * Stir the mixture well
    Lest it prove inferior,
    Then put half a drop
    Into Lake Superior.

    Every other day
    Take a drop in water,
    You'll be better soon
    Or at least you oughter.
  • Better to hunt in fields for health unbought,
    Than fee the doctor for a nauseous draught.
    The wise for cure on exercise depend;
    God never made his work for man to mend.
    • John Dryden, Epistle to John Dryden of Chesterton, line 92.
  • So liv'd our sires, ere doctors learn'd to kill,
    And multiplied with theirs the weekly bill.
  • Even as a Surgeon, minding off to cut
    Some cureless limb, before in use 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' infected part.
  • For of the most High cometh healing.
    • Ecclesiasticus, XXXVIII. 2.
  • One doctor, singly like the sculler plies,
    The patient struggles, and by inches dies;
    But two physicians, like a pair of oars,
    Waft him right swiftly to the Stygian shores.
    • Quoted by Garth, The Dispensary.
  • A single doctor like a sculler plies,
    And all his art and all his physic tries;
    But two physicians, like a pair of oars,
    Conduct you soonest to the Stygian shores.
    • Epigrams Ancient and Modern. Edited by Rev. John Booth, London, 1863, p. 144. Another version signed D, (probably John Dunscombe) in note to Nichols' Select Collection of Poems.
  • "Is there no hope?" the sick man said,
    The silent doctor shook his head,
    And took his leave with signs of sorrow,
    Despairing of his fee to-morrow.
  • Oh, powerful bacillus,
    With wonder how you fill us,
    Every day!
    While medical detectives,
    With powerful objectives,
    Watch your play.
  • I firmly believe that if the whole materia medica could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be all the better for mankind and all the worse for the fishes.
  • A pill that the present moment is daily bread to thousands.
  • Orandum est, ut sit mens sana in corpore sano.
    • A sound mind in a sound body is a thing to be prayed for.
    • Juvenal, Satires (early 2nd century), X. 356.
  • You behold in me
    Only a travelling Physician;
    One of the few who have a mission
    To cure incurable diseases,
    Or those that are called so.
  • Physician, heal thyself.
    • Luke, IV. 23. Quoted as a proverb.
  • And in requital ope his leathern scrip,
    And show me simples of a thousand names,
    Telling their strange and vigorous faculties.
  • Adrian, the Emperor, exclaimed incessantly, when dying, "That the crowd of physicians had killed him."
  • How the Doctor's brow should smile,
    Crown'd with wreaths of camomile.
  • Dulcia non ferimus; succo renovamus amaro.
    • We do not bear sweets; we are recruited by a bitter potion.
    • Ovid, Ars Amatoria, III. 583.
  • Medicus nihil aliud est quam animi consolatio.
  • I have heard that Tiberius used to say that that man was ridiculous, who after sixty years, appealed to a physician.
    • Plutarch, De Sanitate tuenda, Volume II.
  • 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.
  • Learn from the beasts the physic of the field.
  • Who shall decide when doctors disagree,
    And soundest casuists doubt, like you and me?
  • Banished the doctor, and expell'd the friend.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Physicians, of all men, are most happy: whatever good success soever they have, the world proclaimeth and what faults they commit, the earth covereth.
  • Use three Physicians,
    Still-first Dr. Quiet,
    Next Dr. Merry-man
    And Dr. Dyet.
    • From Regimen Sanitatis Salernitanum, Edition 1607.
  • No cataplasm so rare,
    Collected from all simples that have virtue
    Under the moon, can save the thing from death.
  • In poison there is physic; and these news,
    Having been well, that would have made me sick;
    Being sick, have in some measure made me well.
  • How does your patient, doctor?
    Not so sick, my lord,
    As she is troubled with thick-coming fancies.
  • Canst thou not minister to a mind diseas'd,
    Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
    Raze out the written troubles of the brain,
    And with some sweet oblivious antidote
    Cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff
    Which weighs upon the heart?
  • Therein the patient
    Must minister to himself.
    Throw physic to the dogs; I'll none of it.
  • 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.
  • I do remember an apothecary,—
    And hereabouts he dwells,—whom late I noted
    In tatter'd weeds, with overwhelming brows,
    Culling of simples; meagre were his looks,
    Sharp misery had worn him to the bones:
    And in his needy shop a tortoise hung,
    An alligator stuff'd, and other skins
    Of ill-shaped fishes; and about his shelves
    A beggarly account of empty boxes,
    Green earthen pots, bladders and musty seeds,
    Remnants of packthread and old cakes of roses,
    Were thinly scatter'd to make up a show.
  • Trust not the physician;
    His antidotes are poison, and he slays
    More than you rob.
  • Crudelem medicum intemperans æger facit.
    • A disorderly patient makes the physician cruel.
    • Syrus, Maxims.
  • He (Tiberius) was wont to mock at the arts of physicians, and at those who, after thirty years of age, needed counsel as to what was good or bad for their bodies.
    • Tacitus, Annals, Book VI, Chapter XLVI. Same told by Suetonius, Life of Tiberius, Chapter LXVIII.
  • Ægrescitque medendo.
    • The medicine increases the disease.
    • Virgil, Æneid (29-19 BC), XII. 46.
  • But nothing is more estimable than a physician who, having studied nature from his youth, knows the properties of the human body, the diseases which assail it, the remedies which will benefit it, exercises his art with caution, and pays equal attention to the rich and the poor.
    • Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique portatif ("A Philosophical Dictionary") (1764), Physicians.

See also

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