c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
To her despair was added a philosophical dejection, the feeling of every thinker who, venturing an inquisitive finger beneath the velvet of a throne, comes upon the coarse pinewood . . . And then it was she fell victim to a still more painful disquiet. The dead man they had just carted off, like a lump of matter no longer of any use, made it hideously plain how closely hospitals resemble factories. Under the scalpel, living flesh is treated there like wood under the plane or steel under the rolling-mill.
— Maurice Renard, The Hands Of Orlac
Cannabis is just way too healthy for a sick health care system
— Sebastian Marincolo
The pressures of the current neoliberal capitalist system of health care and its financing force health professionals into a double bind. Either they spend the time and energy necessary to listen to and fully treat the patient and put their job and clinic in economic jeopardy, or they move at a frenetic pace to keep their practice afloat and only partially attend to the patient in their presence.
— Seth Holmes, Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States
In this work against sickness, we begin not with genetic or cellular interactions, but with human ones. They are what make medicine so complex and fascinating.
— Atul Gawande, Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance
For years I had convinced myself that, as a doctor, I sacrificed moments with friends, family, and my husband for the greater good. The call to heal the sick and tend the injured superseded all else. The Lord heaped blessings upon me, and I hurled them back in the name of “service” to him.I’m a woman surgeon, I would snap. You made me this way. I have a legacy to carry on...The prospect of abandoning a secure position with excellent prospects for advancement terrified me. I spent many nights agonizing that, despite the Lord’s call, my decision to leave medicine was reckless or irresponsible. Such fears are normal and expected, but reflect our own limited understanding, rather than an enduring faith in the Lord. God is sovereign over our lives, and whatever doubts we have, we may trust that he knows the path and is in command over all.Christ has already overcome, and so we have nothing to fear. From Proverbs: “The heart of man plans his way, but the Lord establishes his steps” (Proverbs 16:9), and “trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths” (Proverbs 3:5–6)...From 1 Thessalonians 1:3: We remember “before our God and Father your work of faith and labor of love and steadfastness of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ.” Christ died and rose victorious over death and sin to free us, so that we may have the hope and fulfillment that comes from living in him.
— Kathryn Butler
He wasn't a patient. I expect someone cured him. You cure a lot of people in this country, don't you, with bullets?
— Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory
As pervasive as medicine has become in modern life, it remains mostly hidden and often misunderstood. We have taken it to be both more perfect than it is and less extraordinary than it can be.
— Gawande Atul
Lord, give me strength and ability to understand when I can heal,but give me the wisdom to understand when my profession is useless.
— Prayer of a Doctor in Ancient Egypt.
Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio describes emotions as the "continuous musical line of our minds, the unstoppable humming." This basso continuo thrums along while doctors make a steady stream of conscious medical decisions.
— Danielle Ofri, What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine
Words began to feel as weightless as the breath that carried. Stepping back, I realized that I was merely confirming what I already knew: I wanted that direct experience. It was only in practicing medicine that I could pursue a serious biological philosophy. Moral speculation was puny compared to moral action.
— Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air
It is more important to know what sort of person has a disease than to know what sort of disease a person has.
— Hippocrates
Cure sometimes, treat often and comfort always.
— Hippocrates
Public "facts" are not like pebbles on the beach, lying in the sun and waiting to be seen. They must instead be picked, polished, shaped and packaged. Finally ready for display they the bear the marks of their shapers.
— Peter Conrad, Deviance and Medicalization: From Badness to Sickness
Reality" is defined not as something that exists "out there" for the scientist or anyone else to discover but as a social construction that emerges from and is sustained by social interaction.
— Peter Conrad, Deviance and Medicalization: From Badness to Sickness
A doctor's mission should not be to prevent death, but more importantly it should be to improve the quality of life.
— Abhijit Naskar
In our society, unless something can be measured then it doesn't exist. This is especially true in the world of medicine.
— Michael Perkins
...[D]eviance is an attributed designation rather than something inherent in individuals...
— Peter Conrad, Deviance and Medicalization: From Badness to Sickness
When a theological world view dominated, deviance was sin; when the nation-states emerged from the decay of feudalism, most deviance became designated as crime; and in our own scientifically oriented world, various forms of deviance are designated increasingly as medical problems. Thus we view the medical paradigm as the ascending paradigm for deviance designations in our postindustrial society.
— Peter Conrad, Deviance and Medicalization: From Badness to Sickness
[T]here are no illnesses in nature, only relationships. There are, of course, naturally occurring events, including infectious viruses, malignant growths, ruptures of tissues, and unusual chromosome constellations, but these are not ipso facto illnesses. Without the social meaning that humans attach to them they do not constitute illness or disease: The fracture of a septuagenarian's femur has, within the world of nature, so more significance than the snapping of an autumn leaf from its twig; and the invasion of a human organism by cholera germs carries with it no more the stamp of "illness" than the souring of milk by other forms of bacteria. (Sedgwick, 1972, p. 211)
— Peter Conrad, Deviance and Medicalization: From Badness to Sickness
Illnesses represent human judgments of conditions that exist in the natural world. They are essentially social constructions - products of our own creation.
— Peter Conrad, Deviance and Medicalization: From Badness to Sickness
[S]ocial change is not clearly linear and rarely totally beneficial or detrimental. Social change nearly nearly always produces positive and negative effects that are distributed differentially in the affected population.
— Peter Conrad, Deviance and Medicalization: From Badness to Sickness
But they turned out to be prescriptions for medicines, and not for the common cold: opium, lavender oil, belladonna, orange rind, chloral hydrate, strychnine, potassium bromide. Such sedatives and stimulants were common remedies at that time for epilepsy.
— Catherine Bailey, Black Diamonds: The Rise and Fall of an English Dynasty
What each culture views as the cause of madness is dependent on its world view.
— Peter Conrad, Deviance and Medicalization: From Badness to Sickness
Being a doctor, you are not supposed to give vent to any signs of revulsion on encountering the most noxious of odours or the most gruesome of sights.
— Anurag Shourie, Half A Shadow
I should never have been happy in any profession that did not call forth the highest intellectual strain, and yet keep me in good warm contact with my neighbors. There is nothing like the medical profession for that: one can have the exclusive scientific life that touches the distance and befriend the old fogie in the parish too.
— George Eliot, Middlemarch
Doctors are allowed to practice medicine. What are you called when you are not practicing any more and finally know what your doing?
— Chuck Bridges
When ill, the patient assumes what Parsons called "the sick-role". Accordingly, the sick person is, on the one hand, excused his or her social responsabilites, but, on the other hand, is expected to desire a return to health and to comply unquestioningly with the directives of medical experts in order to achieve this goal
— Mary Lindemann, Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe
With all due respect to my surgeon, in a perfect world he would be out of a job.
— Russ Ramsey, Struck: One Christian's Reflections on Encountering Death
What are called viruses are always dead and incapable of any acts whatsoever. Dead matter may be acted upon but never acts of itself.
— T.C. Fry, The Great AIDS Hoax
It just shows you that if you take a plain, ordinary, moronic intern and make him do the same things over and over again until he loses is mind, you can teach him to do almost anything. I think now that I've mastered IVs, I might take up neurosurgery in my spare time.
— Robert Marion, The Intern Blues: The Timeless Classic About the Making of a Doctor
There is an art to medicine as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon’s knife
— Hippocratic OAth
The other thing I remember about the earlier and more active stages of my illness is having a black panther under my bed. After a while it was discovered that I was simply hallucinating as the result of too much arsenic in the medicine I was being given
—  but at the time it must have been even more terrifying for my parents than it was for me.
But against sandfly fever one could be inoculated, and I have another, hideously vivid picture of a great menacing brute of a doctor sticking a Thing that ended in a vicious needle into my mother's arm. Mad to defend my own, I scrambled off my father's knee, and flew to her rescue. I fixed my teeth in the doctor's horrible hairy wrist and hung on like a terrier, until my father succeeded in prising me away. Afterwards, everybody said how wonderful the doctor had been, because he continued calmly giving the inoculation while I was prised off him, instead of breaking the needle in my mother's arm. But nobody said how brave it was of me, only three years old, when all is said and done, and gone in the legs at that, to take on such fearful odds for the sake of love.
— Rosemary Sutcliff, Blue Remembered Hills: A Recollection
In the days of Columbus most medical practices were as much superstition as science. Because of infections, operations were not often performed, except for amputations under dire battlefield conditions. Most of the time these attempts to rectify an abnormality ended in disaster. Now things are different, with positive results being expected and are so frequent that people depend on elective surgery to enhance their lives.
— Hank Bracker
The great error of physicians has been that of attributing recovery to the operations of their poisons, while they have left out of account the healing powers of the body itself.
— Herbert M. Shelton, History of Natural Hygiene and Principles of Natural Hygiene
When our time is limited and we are uncertain about how best to serve our priorities, we are forced to deal with the fact that both the experiencing self and the remembering self matter. We do not want to endure long pain and short pleasure. Yet certain pleasures can make enduring suffering worthwhile. The peaks are important, and so is the ending.
— Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
In the pre-war era when itinerant home-remedy salesmen still wandered the country, they had a traditional patter for selling a potion that was supposed to be particularly effective in treating burns and cuts. A toad with four legs in front and six behind would be placed in a box with mirrors lining the four walls. The toad, amazed at its own appearance from every angle, would break into an oily sweat. This sweat would be collected and simmered for 3,721 days while being stirred with a willow branch. The result was the marvelous potion.When writing about myself, I feel something like that toad in the box.
— Akira Kurosawa, Something Like an Autobiography
Surgery was the most difficult thing I could imagine.And so I became a surgeon.
— Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone
I was temperamentally better suited to a cognitive discipline, to an introspective field—internal medicine, or perhaps psychiatry. The sight of the operating theater made me sweat. The idea of holding a scalpel caused coils to form in my belly. (It still does.) Surgery was the most difficult thing I could imagine.And so I became a surgeon.
— Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone
I find that it is the best trade of all; for, whether we manage well or ill, we are paid just the same.
— Molière, Le Médecin Malgré Lui
Well, I've known over thirty men who've found out how to cure consumption. Why do people go on dying of it, Colly? Devilment I suppose!
— George Bernard Shaw, The Doctor's Dilemma: A Tragedy
A shoemaker, in making a pair of shoes, cannot spoil a scrap of leather without having to bear the loss; but in our business we may spoil a man without its costing us a farthing. The blunders are never put down to us, and it is always the fault of the fellow who dies. The best of this profession is, that there is the greatest honesty and discretion among the dead; for you never find them complain of the physician who has killed them.
— Molière, Le Médecin Malgré Lui
If I’ve learned anything, it's that we know next to nothing. Disease is a mystery. Health is inscrutable. The body itself is scarcely understood; we can only examine the secrets of the dead. And in all that dark ignorance, we're sometimes granted a rare moment of illumination. The truth is a gift.
— Courtney Milan, A Kiss For Midwinter
Effort does matter
—  diligence and attention to the minutest details can save you.
There has never been a miracle drug that could equal the Word of God. God’s medicine is the answer to every need.
— Paul Silway, Heaven I - Paradise: The City and Throne
The Lord hath created medicines out of the earth
—  and he that is wise will not abhor them.
All my patients are individuals with their own story to tell, their own set of problems and their own solution. Even where the symptoms of their distress are very similar, the roads that bring them to me are not. Each of them teaches me something important, just as each new patient I meet reminds me that there is always more to learn.
— Suzanne O'Sullivan, It's All in Your Head: True Stories of Imaginary Illness
Do what is right, and do it now.
— Atul Gawande, Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance
Death with dignity" is our society's expression of the uni­versal yearning to achieve a graceful triumph over the stark and often repugnant finality of life's last sputterings. But the fact is, death is not a confrontation. It is simply an event in the sequence of nature's ongoing rhythms. Not death but disease is the real enemy, disease the malign force that requires confron­tation. Death is the surcease that comes when the exhausting bat­tle has been lost. Even the confrontation with disease should be approached with the realization that many of the sicknesses of our species are simply conveyances for the inexorable journey by which each of us is returned to the same state of physical, and perhaps spiritual, nonexistence from which we emerged at conception. Every triumph over some major pathology, no matter how ringing the victory, is only a reprieve from the inevitable end.
— Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die: Reflections of Life's Final Chapter
Recent sociological findings indicate that while "whites have largely abandoned principled racism... they have not necessarily given up negative racial stereotypes" or "negative sentiments and beliefs about African Americans.
— John Hoberman, Black and Blue: The Origins and Consequences of Medical Racism
...my patient needed a great deal of reassurance that there had been nothing unusual about the way her mother died, that she had not done something wrong to prevent her mother from experiencing that "spiritual" death with dignity that she had anticipated. All of her efforts and expectations had been in vain, and now this very intelligent woman was in despair. I tried to make clear to her that the belief in the probability of death with dignity is our, and society's, attempt to deal with the reality of what is all too frequently a series of destructive events that involve by their very nature the disintegration of the dying person's humanity. I have not often seen much dignity in the process by which we die.
— Sherwin B. Nuland
Several years ago, I realized that I didn’t want to spend all my life in medicine. It had me in a sort of spiritual box, like a plant whose roots are getting crowded. I felt I wasn’t growing. So I promised myself that I would quit while I still had the energy to get involved in something new. There’s nothing wrong with medicine. There’s more paperwork, more lawsuits, less understanding between doctors and patients. But it’s still a great business. But not for me - not any longer.
— Richard S. Weeder, Surgeon: The View from Behind the Mask
What is troubling is not just being average but settling for it. Everyone knows that average-ness is, for most of us, our fate. And in certain matters—looks, money, tennis—we would do well to accept this. But in your surgeon, your child's pediatrician, your police department, your local high school? When the stakes are our lives and the lives of our children, we want no one to settle for average.
— Atul Gawande
[We think our job is to ensure health and survival. But really it is larger than that. It is to enable well-being. And well-being is about the reasons one wishes to be alive. Those reasons matter not just at the end of life, or when debility comes, but all along the way. Whenever serious sickness or injury strikes and your body or mind breaks down, the vital questions are the same: What is your understanding of the situation and its potential outcomes? What are your fears and what are your hopes? What are the trade-offs you are willing to make and not willing to make? And what is the course of action that best serves this understanding?
— Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
At least two kinds of courage are required in aging and sickness. The first is the courage to confront the reality of mortality- the courage to seek out the truth of what is to be feared and what is to be hoped. But even more daunting is the second kind of courage - the courage to act on the truth we find.
— Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
I always feel that young doctors are only too anxious too experiment. After they've whipped out all our teeth, and administered quantities of very peculiar glands, and removed bits of our insides, they then confess that nothing can be done for us. I really prefer the old-fashioned remedy of big black bottles of medicine. After all, one can always pour those down the sink.
— Agatha Christie, A Murder Is Announced
A so-called antimony war had been waged between French [Galenist] physicians and [alchemical, Paracelsian] iatrochemists since the beginning of the seventeenth century. What it lacked in bloodletting, this war made up for in bile.
— Philip Ball, The Devil's Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science
Alcenith Crawford (a divorced ophthalmologist): "We women doctors have un-happy marriages because in our minds we are the superstars of our families. Having survived the hardship of medical school we expect to reap our rewards at home. We had to assert ourselves against all odds and when we finally graduate there are few shrinking violets amongst us. It takes a special man to be able to cope. Men like to feel important and be the undisputed head of the family. A man does not enjoy waiting for his wife while she performs life-saving operations. He expects her and their children to revolve around his needs, not the other way. But we have become accustomed to giving orders in hospitals and having them obeyed. Once home, it's difficult to adjust. Moreover, we often earn more than our husbands. It takes a generous and exceptional man to forgive all that.
— Adeline Yen Mah, Falling Leaves: The Memoir of an Unwanted Chinese Daughter
To talk of diseases is a sort of Arabian Nights entertainment.
— William Osler
Perhaps the greatest danger in the way that alternative therapists behave is simply the promotion of their own treatments when patients should be in the care of a conventional doctor. There are numerous reports of patients with serious conditions (e.g. diabetes, cancer, AIDS) suffering harm after following irresponsible advice form alternative practitioners instead of following the advice of a doctor.
— Simon Singh, Trick or Treatment: The Undeniable Facts about Alternative Medicine
(Florence) Nightingale's passion for statistics enabled her to persuade the government of the importance of a whole series of health reforms. for example, many people had argued that training nurses was a waste of time, because patients cared for by trained nurses actually had a higher mortality rate than those treated by untrained staff. Nightingale, however, pointed out that this was only because more serious cases were being sent to those wards with trained nurses. If the intention is to compare the results from two groups, then it is essential to assign patients randomly to the two groups. Sure enough, when Nightingale set up trials in which patients were randomly assigned to trained and untrained nurses, it became clear that the cohort of patients treated by trained nurses fared much better than their counterparts in wards with untrained nurses.
— Simon Singh, Trick or Treatment: The Undeniable Facts about Alternative Medicine
The case which I reported on September 26, 1901, was really the last which occurred in Havana. Of course we did not know it at the time, but this case marked the first conquest of yellow fever in an endemic center; the first application of the mosquito theory to practical sanitary work in any disease.
— William Crawford Gorgas, Sanitation in Panama
I have done so much medical and scientific research Crashing Life I am thinking about putting PhD behind my name or maybe B.S.
— Juanita Ray
Turning at the sound of voices, Amelia saw Merripen carrying her sister outside. Win was dressed in a nightgown and robe and swathed in a shawl, her slim arms looped around Merripen’s neck. With her white garments and blond hair and fair skin, Win was nearly colorless except for the flags of soft pink across her cheekbones and the vivid blue of her eyes. “… that was the most terrible medicine,” she was saying cheerfully. “It worked,” Merripen pointed out, bending to settle her carefully on the chaise. “That doesn’t mean I forgive you for bullying me into taking it.” “It was for your own good.” “You’re a bully,” Win repeated, smiling into his dark face. “Yes, I know,” Merripen murmured, tucking the lap blankets around her with extreme care. Delighted by the improvement in her sister’s condition, Amelia smiled. “He really is dreadful. But if he manages to persuade more villagers to help clean the house, you will have to forgive him, Win.” Win’s blue eyes twinkled. She spoke to Amelia, while her gaze remained on Merripen. “I have every faith in his powers of persuasion.
— Lisa Kleypas, Mine Till Midnight
When you cure a blind person, he or she is not a statistic.
— Geoff Tabin
Label-locked thinking can affect treatment. For instance, I heard a doctor say about a kid with gastrointestinal issues, “Oh, he has autism. That’s the problem”—and then he didn’t treat the GI problem.
— Temple Grandin, The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum
No matter who you were in sixteenth-century Europe, you could be sure of two things: you would be lucky to reach fifty years of age, and you could expect a life of discomfort and pain. Old age tires the body by thirty-five, Erasmus lamented, but half the population did not live beyond the age of twenty. There were doctors and there was medicine, but there does not seem to have been a great deal of healing. Anyone who could afford to seek a doctor's aid did so eagerly, but the doctor was as likely to maim or kill as to cure. His potions were usually noxious and sometimes fatal—but they could not have been as terrible and traumatic as the contemporary surgical methods. The surgeon and the Inquisitor differed only in their motivation: otherwise, their batteries of knives, saws, and tongs for slicing, piercing, burning, and amputating were barely distinguishable. Without any anesthetic other than strong liquor, an operation was as bad as the torments of hell.
— Philip Ball, The Devil's Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science
To confront death every day, to see it for yourself, you have to love the living
— Judy Melinek
Medicine’s a funny business. After all, dispensing chemicals is considered mainstream and diet and nutrition is considered alternative.
— Charles F. Glassman, Brain Drain   The Breakthrough That Will Change Your Life
It ain't easy to do nothing, now that society is telling everyone that their body is fundamentally flawed and about to self-destruct. People are afraid they're on the verge of death all the time
— Samuel Shem, The House of God
Sometimes it's the person giving you the medicine who's making you sick.
— Steve Maraboli
The wheel of life: one generation rises like summer wheat, then withers and falls to seed. The wheel turns - birth, youth, adulthood, parenthood, senescence, death - driven by genetic machinery set in motion so many eons ago. For all its subtleties and infinite beauty, life has but one purpose: to keep the wheel turning.
— Frank Vertosick Jr.
How do you tell the psychiatrists from the patients in the hospital?The patients get better and leave.
— Lisa Scottoline, Every Fifteen Minutes
I know you're on my side," an immunologist once remarked to me as we discussed the politics of vaccination. I did not agree with him, but only because I was uncomfortable with both sides, as I had seen them delineated. The debate over vaccination tends to be described with what the philosopher of science Donna Haraway would call "troubling dualisms." These dualisms pit science against nature, public against private, truth against imagination, self against other, thought against emotion, and man against woman.
— Eula Biss, On Immunity: An Inoculation
In the community of living tissues, the uncontrolled mob of misfits that is cancer behaves like a gang of perpetually wilding adolescents. They are the juvenile delinquents of cellular society.
— Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die: Reflections of Life's Final Chapter
A slow but steady transformation of deviance has taken place in American society. It has not been a change in behavior as such, but in how behavior is defined. Deviant behaviors that were once defined as immoral, sinful, or criminal have been given medical meanings. Some say that rehabilitation has replaced punishment, but in many cases medical treatments have become a new form of punishment and social control.
— Peter Conrad, Deviance and Medicalization: From Badness to Sickness
The apothecary’s name was Owlglass. He hummed to himself as he worked in his back room. He’d found a new type of blue fluff, which he was grinding down. It was probably good for curing something. He’d have to try it out on people until he found out what.
— Terry Pratchett, The Carpet People
I wonder if much that ails our society stems from the fact that we have allowed ourselves to be cut off from that love of, and from, the land. It is medicine for broken land and empty hearts.
— Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants
The cure of even one solid cancer in adults, Farber knew, would singularly revolutionize oncology. It would provide the most concrete proof that this was a winnable war.
— Siddhartha Mukherjee
The nineteenth century is called the century of hygiene, and the twentieth is the century of medicine. The twenty-first century may be the century of behavioral change. Changing everyday, long-term behaviors--how we exercise, what we eat--is the key to adding years and quality to our lives.
— Michael Stein
Though everyone may yearn for a tranquil death, the basic instinct to stay alive is a far more powerful force
— Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die: Reflections of Life's Final Chapter
I'm telling you that the cure is the disease. The main source of the illness in this world is the doctor's own illness
—  his compulsion to try to cure and his fraudulent belief that he can.
Life is choices, and they are relentless. No sooner have you made one choice than another is upon you.
— Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
Science of yoga and ayurveda is subtler than the science of medicine, because science of medicine is often victim of statistical manipulation.
— Amit Ray
There is a saying about surgeons, meant as a reproof: "Sometimes wrong; never in doubt." But this seemed to me their strength. Each day surgeons are faced with uncertainties. Information is inadequate; the science is ambiguous; one's knowledge and abilities are never perfect. Even with the simplest operation, it cannot be taken for granted that a patient will come through better off - or even alive. Standing at the table my first time, I wondered how the surgeon knew that he would do this patient good, that all the steps would go as planned, that the bleeding would be controlled and infection would not take hold and organs would not be injured. He didn't, of course. But still he cut.
— Atul Gawande, Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science
And when comfort is what we want, one of the most powerful tonics alternative medicine offers is the word 'natural.' This word implies a medicine untroubled by human limitations, contrived wholly by nature or God or perhaps intelligent design. What 'natural' has come to mean to us in the context of medicine is 'pure' and 'safe' and 'benign'. But the use of 'natural' as a synonym for 'good' is almost certainly a product of our profound alienation from the natural world.
— Eula Biss, On Immunity: An Inoculation
In these days before antiseptics, doctors themselves also suffered high mortality rates. Florence Nightingale, a nurse during the Crimean War (1853-1856), watched one particularly inept surgeon cut both himself and, somehow, a bystander while blundering about during an amputation. Both men contracted an infection and died, as did the patient. Nightingale commented that it was the only surgery she'd ever seen with 300 percent mortality.
— Sam Kean, The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons: The History of the Human Brain as Revealed by True Stories of Trauma, Madness, and Recovery
The core predicament of medicine - the thing that makes being a patient so wrenching, being a doctor so difficult, and being a part of society that pays the bills they run up so vexing - is uncertainty. With all that we know nowadays about people and diseases and how to diagnose and treat them, it can be hard to see this, hard to grasp how deeply uncertainty runs. As a doctor, you come to find, however, that the struggle in caring for people is more often with what you do not know than what you do. Medicine's ground state is uncertainty. And wisdom - for both the patients and doctors - is defined by how one copes with it.
— Atul Gawande, Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science
When push comes to shove we can afford to lose an arm or a leg, but I am operating on peoples thoughts and feelings... and if something goes wrong I can destroy that persons character... forever.
— Henry Marsh
The simple view is that medicine exists to fight death and disease, and that is, of course, its most basic task. Death is the enemy. But the enemy has superior forces. Eventually, it wins. And, in a war that you cannot win, you don't want a general who fights to the point of total annihilation. You don't want Custer. You want Robert E. Lee, someone who knew how to fight for territory when he could and how to surrender when he couldn't, someone who understood that the damage is greatest if all you do is fight to the bitter end.
— Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
In a sense, the Earth is mounting an immune response against the human species. It is beginning to react to the human parasite, the flooding infection of people, the dead spots of the concrete all over the planet, the cancerous rot-outs in Europe, Japan and the United States, thick with replicating primates, the colonies enlarging and spreading and threatening to shock the biosphere with mass extinctions. Perhaps the biosphere does not 'like' the idea of five billion humans.
— Richard Preston, the Hot Zone
Medicine is a science of uncertainty and an art of probability.
— William Osler
There is one essential requirement for being close with a dying person: the letting go of self-concern.
— Robert Martensen, A Life Worth Living: A Doctor's Reflections on Illness in a High-Tech Era
If the cardiologist thinks the heart is a wonderful organ, the cardiologist never have heard of the uterus.
— Elmar P. Sakala
We want progress in medicine to be clear and unequivocal, but of course it rarely is. Every new treatment has gaping unknowns - for both patients and society - and it can be hard to decide what do do about them.
— Atul Gawande, Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science
Calling holistic medicine "alternative medicine" is no longer appropriate. The best approach now is "integrated medicine" in which we take the best of both worlds.
— Candess M. Campbell
Our health care approaches squander billions on extravagant treatment regimes that end up accomplishing little, as a society we refuse to adopt the small, even tiny adjustments that could easily reduce the clawing uncertainties that now degrade millions.
— Robert Martensen, A Life Worth Living: A Doctor's Reflections on Illness in a High-Tech Era
If there is a credo in practical medicine, it is that the important thing is to be sensible.
— Atul Gawande, Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science
Without the patient, there is no healthcare.
— Christopher M. Giambruno
Indeed, this crisis was also spurred by the abandonment of professional ideals in the pursuit of profit that made managed care necessary in the first place.
— Sandeep Jauhar
Like plumbing, medicine is a profession where you learn early on not to put your fingers in your mouth.
— Diana Gabaldon, Written in My Own Heart's Blood
Work, he said, was a first-rate medicine for any illness.
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich
Such is the demographic paradox of a junior physician's relationship with his patients: I worry about how to extend their lives. This anxiety inevitably shortens my own.
— Jacob M. Appel, Phoning Home
We are not able to express ourselves in a hospital, even when seriously ill, we don�t have time.
— Julio Pereira, THOUGHTS FROM THE HOSPITAL: 1
They found the Infirmary of Justice much as they had left it: white institutional walls, too-bright floors, and a reassuring smell of antiseptic. Reassuring at least to Tara, because the smell signalled that the people running this infirmary knew about antiseptic.
— Max Gladstone, Three Parts Dead
The evening was a string of miserable minutes strung together in tiny clusters. Three minutes for a man shot through the shoulder; Ellis put first a finger in the entry wound and then another in the exit and when his fingers touched, he decided the man was only lightly injured and didn’t need a surgeon. Three minutes to set a broken wrist and splint it with a strip of cowhide and a piece of wood from a sycamore tree. Two minutes to tourniquet a leg, then extract a piece of wire deep in the meat of it. A minute to peek under a pink, saturated bandage several inches below a slender belly button; he saw thin, red water leaking from a hole and smelled urine, knew the ball had breached the bladder. It would either heal or it wouldn’t, but nothing to do about it so he set the soul aside, a case not to be operated upon. He turned a man’s head looking for the source of a trickle of blood and had ten terrible minutes trying to stop torrential bleeding from under his clavicle; frantic moments during which he could get neither a finger nor a clamp around the pulsating source. All bleeding stops eventually though, and the case did not violate the rule. He took two minutes to settle his own breathing, then four minutes sewing a torn scalp, and half a minute saying a prayer over a fat, cigar-shaped dead man. After awhile, he had the impression he wasn’t seeing men, but parts—an exploded chest, a blood swolled thigh, a busted jaw with its teeth spat to the wind or swallowed.It was more than a man could take and a lot less than there was to be seen.
— Edison McDaniels, Not One Among Them Whole: A Novel of Gettysburg
What medicines do not heal, the lance will; what the lance does not heal, fire will.
— Hippocrates
My book contains texts that I wrote during college, medical school and during my residency of neurosurgery. I could set the book �Thoughts from the hospital" as clippings thoughts
— Julio Pereira, THOUGHTS FROM THE HOSPITAL: 1
State sponsored medicine and science can function as ideology, inspiring blind commitment, fanatical defensiveness and denial, particularly of outcomes inconsistent with the preferred explanatory model. The social etiology of compromised health, insists on an understanding of these conditions and the way they impact the objectivity or neutrality of scientific and medical interpretation.
— Daniel Waterman
It is not kindness to tell patients that need strong medicine that nothing serious is wrong with them.
— Cornelius Van Til
All things are poison and nothing is without poison, only the dose permits something not to be poisonous.
— Paracelsus
Medicine, as we are practising it, is a luxury trade. We are selling bread at the price of jewels... Let us take the profit, the private economic profit, out of medicine, and purify our profession of rapacious individualism... Let us say to the people not 'How much have you got?' but 'How best can we serve you?
— Norman Bethune
Western doctors are like poor plumbers. They treat a splashing tube by cleaning up the water. These plumbers are extremely apt at drying up the water, constantly inventing new, expensive, and refined methods of drying up water. Somebody should teach them how to close the tap.
— Denis Parsons Burkitt
Labs, too, can become machines. In science, it is more often a pejorative description than a complimentary one: an efficient, thrumming, technically accomplished laboratory is like a robot orchestra that produces perfectly pitched tunes but no music.
— Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
Statistics are somewhat like old medical journals, or like revolvers in newly opened mining districts. Most men rarely use them, and find it troublesome to preserve them so as to have them easy of access; but when they do want them, they want them badly.
— John Shaw Billings
Anatomy is to physiology as geography is to history
—  it describes the theatre of events.
Medicine no doubt, has helped us a lot to cure so many diseases, but death still remains an incurable one!
— Mehek Bassi
Out of all the medical advancements in human history I'm still most in awe of that tiny little piece of toilet paper that can stop a gushing razor cut in its tracks.
— Gregor Collins, The Accidental Caregiver: How I Met, Loved, and Lost Legendary Holocaust Refugee Maria Altmann
Death may be due to a wide variety of diseases and disorders, but in every case the underlying physiological cause is a breakdown in the body's oxygen cycle.
— Dr. Milton Helpern
One popular saying was, "The boy who goes into medicine is too lazy for farm or shop, too stupid for the Bar, and too immoral for the pulpit.
— Volney Steele, Bleed, Blister, and Purge: A History of Medicine on the American Frontier
There is no way to deter old age from its grim duty, but a life of accomplishments makes up in quality for what it cannot add in quantity.
— Dr. Sherwin Nuland
Advances in medicine and agriculture have saved vastly more lives than have been lost in all the wars in history.
— Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
Every medicine is vain.
— Aeschylus, Agamemnon
I had fallen in love with a young man..., and we were planning to get married. And then he died of subacute bacterial endocarditis... Two years later with the advent of penicillin, he would have been saved. It reinforced in my mind the importance of scientific discovery...
— Gertrude B. Elion
Medicine, I have reason since to notice more than once, remains an imperfect art.
— Joan Didion, Blue Nights
This original version of Coca-Cola contained a small amount of coca extract and therefore a trace of cocaine. (It was eliminated early in the twentieth century, though other extracts derived from coca leaves remain part of the drink to this day.) Its creation was not the accidental concoction of an amateur experimenting in his garden, but the deliberate and painstaking culmination of months of work by an experienced maker of quack remedies.
— Tom Standage, A History of the World in 6 Glasses
I have found that if I tend to a person’s illness rather than to theperson, I am going to treat that person as if they are their illness. In doing so, I run the risk of limiting them greatly and helping them to focus in on their illness as if that is all they are. It is so important to see and help a person and not just a condition. Everyone is different, with unique twists and challenges, so the same herbs are not applied for the same 'condition.' The herbs chosen are connected to the whole personincluding their illness, their constitution, their diet, their psychology, theirhistory, their tastes, their lifestyle, and their joys and sorrows. I alwaystry to set a person up to succeed, and take their preferences, abilities, stamina, and financial resources into account when helping choose their plant medicines.
— Robin Rose Bennett, The Gift of Healing Herbs: Plant Medicines and Home Remedies for a Vibrantly Healthy Life
To her [Florence Nightingale] chiefly I owed the awakening to the fact that sanitation is the supreme goal of medicine its foundation and its crown.
— Elizabeth Blackwell, Pioneer Work In Opening The Medical Profession To Women
Unlike modern pills, these hard antimony pills didn’t dissolve in the intestines, and the pills were considered so valuable that people rooted through fecal matter to retrieve and reuse them. Some lucky families even passed down laxatives from father to son. Perhaps for this reason, antimony found heavy work as a medicine, although it’s actually toxic. Mozart probably died from taking too much to combat a severe fever.
— Sam Kean, The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements
If you listen to your body and your intuition, they’ll guide you well. There are countless ways to develop listening skills. Some helpful and classic practices include: dancing and drumming, sitting and walking meditations, t’ai chi or chi kung, painting or journal writing. It’s important to find what works for you, and even the time of day or night that works best for you. Whatever you choose, the commonality is that they all offer an opportunity for quieting the mind, and slowing down enough to bepresent and able to listen for inner guidance—and guidance from the plants themselves.
— Robin Rose Bennett, The Gift of Healing Herbs: Plant Medicines and Home Remedies for a Vibrantly Healthy Life
I would not be among you to-night (being awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine) but for the mentors, colleagues and students who have guided and aided me throughout my scientific life. I wish I could name them all and tell you their contributions. More, however, than anyone else it was the late Rudolf Schoenheimer, a brilliant scholar and a man of infectious enthusiasm, who introduced me to the wonders of Biochemistry. Ever since, I have been happy to have chosen science as my career, and, to borrow a phrase of Jacques Barzun, have felt that 'Science is, in the best and strictest sense, glorious entertainment'.
— Konrad Bloch
Dermatology ... this young daughter of medicine ...
— Paul Gerson Unna
If ever there was a plant that speaks to its connection to your heart, it is sweet blue violet. Not only does violet help your body dissolve cysts, lumps, and bumps, this plant’s soothing nature can help you dissolve the red-hot burn of anger, cool the draining white heat of frustration and resentment, and relieve the simmering roil of feeling stuck in separation when ruled by your judgmental mind.
— Robin Rose Bennett, The Gift of Healing Herbs: Plant Medicines and Home Remedies for a Vibrantly Healthy Life
There is no body cavity that cannot be reached with a number fourteen needle and a good strong arm.
— Samuel Shem, The House of God
Where there were once several competing approaches to medicine, there is now only one that matters to most hospitals, insurers, and the vast majority of the public. One that has been shaped to a great degree by the successful development of potent cures that followed the discovery of sulfa drugs. Aspiring caregivers today are chosen as much (or more) for their scientific abilities, their talent for mastering these manifold technological and pharmaceutical advances as for their interpersonal skills. A century ago most physicians were careful, conservative observers who provided comfort to patients and their families. Today they act: They prescribe, they treat, they cure. They routinely perform what were once considered miracles. The result, in the view of some, has been a shift in the profession from caregiver to technician. The powerful new drugs changed how care was given as well as who gave it.
— Thomas Hager, The Demon Under the Microscope: From Battlefield Hospitals to Nazi Labs, One Doctor's Heroic Search for the World's First Miracle Drug
There is no such thing as a special category of science called applied science; there is science and its applications, which are related to one another as the fruit is related to the tree that has borne it.
— Louis Pasteur, Correspondence of Pasteur and Thuillier Concerning Anthrax and Swine Fever Vaccinations
It has been demonstrated that a species of penicillium produces in culture a very powerful antibacterial substance which affects different bacteria in different degrees. Generally speaking it may be said that the least sensitive bacteria are the Gram-negative bacilli, and the most susceptible are the pyogenic cocci ... In addition to its possible use in the treatment of bacterial infections penicillin is certainly useful... for its power of inhibiting unwanted microbes in bacterial cultures so that penicillin insensitive bacteria can readily be isolated.
— Alexander Fleming
REVIEW: Like a master artisan, Weisberger weaves together threads of anthropology, botany, ecology and psychology in an inspiring tapestry of ideas sure to keep discerning readers warm and hopeful in these cold and desolate times.Unlike other texts, which ordinarily prescribe structural (ie. social, political, economic) solutions to the global crisis of environmental destruction, Rainforest Medicine hones in on the root cause of Western schizophrenia: spiritual poverty, and the resultant alienation of the individual from his environment. This incisive perception is married to a message of hope: that the keys to the door leading to promising new human vistas are held in the humblest of hands; those of the spiritual masters of the Amazon and the traditional cultures from which they hail. By illumining the ancient practices of authentic indigenous Amazonian shamanism, Weisberger supplies us with a manual for conservation of both the rainforest and the soul. And frankly, it could not have arrived at a better time.
— Jonathon Miller Weisberger, Rainforest Medicine: Preserving Indigenous Science and Biodiversity in the Upper Amazon
Chlamydia, today´s most common cause of venereal disease, does the equivalent of hiding in the police station.Schistosomes of the mansoni type go a step further and essentially steal police uniforms. These parasites, a serious cause of liver disease in Asia, pick up blood-group antigens so that they may look to the immune system like our own normal blood cells.
— Randolph M. Nesse, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine