“My doctor gave me six months to live but when I couldn't pay the bill, he gave me six months more.”
“When a man goes through six years training to be a doctor he will never be the same. He knows too much.”
“Doctors don't know everything really. They understand matter, not spirit. And you and I live in spirit.”
“The physician's highest calling, his only calling, is to make sick people healthy -- to heal, as it is termed.”
“The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.”
“Surgeons must be very careful. When they take the knife!, underneath their fine incisions, stirs the Culprit -- Life!”
“The more ignorant, reckless and thoughtless a doctor is, the higher his reputation soars even amongst powerful princes.”
“He has been a doctor a year now and has had two patients, no, three, I think -- yes, it was three; I attended their funerals.”
“I suppose one has a greater sense of intellectual degradation after an interview with a doctor than from any human experience.”
“Doctors are just the same as lawyers; the only difference is that lawyers merely rob you, whereas doctors rob you and kill you too.”
“The superior doctor prevents sickness; The mediocre doctor attends to impending sickness; The inferior doctor treats actual sickness;”
“Every doctor will allow a colleague to decimate a whole countryside sooner than violate the bond of professional etiquette by giving him away.”
“I asked [my doctors] if I'd be able to play singles tennis and they said I could. That made me very happy since I haven't played in five years.”
“Doctors are men who prescribe medicines of which they know little, to cure diseases of which they know less, in human beings of whom they know nothing.”
“For what Harley Street specialist has time to understand the body, let alone the mind or both in combination, when he is a slave to thirteen thousand a year?”
“The doctor learns that if he gets ahead of the superstitions of his patients he is a ruined man; and the result is that he instinctively takes care not to get ahead of them.”
“For each illness that doctors cure with medicine, they provoke ten in healthy people by inoculating them with the virus that is a thousand times more powerful than any microbe: the idea that one is ill.”
“Men who are occupied in the restoration of health to other men, by the joint exertion of skill and humanity, are above all the great of the earth. They even partake of divinity, since to preserve and renew is almost as noble as to create.”
“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. A doctor who cannot take out your appendix properly will recommend you to a doctor who will be unable to remove your tonsils with success.”
“Instead of wishing to see more doctors made by women joining what there are, I wish to see as few doctors, either male or female, as possible. For, mark you, the women have made no improvement -- they have only tried to be ''men'' and they have only succeeded in being third-rate men.”
“Is it not also true that no physician, in so far as he is a physician, considers or enjoins what is for the physician's interest, but that all seek the good of their patients? For we have agreed that a physician strictly so called, is a ruler of bodies, and not a maker of money, have we not?”
“The majority of the diseases which the human family have been and still are suffering under, they have created by ignorance of their own organic health, and work perseveringly to tear themselves to pieces, and when broken down and debilitated in body and mind, send for the doctor and drug themselves to death.”
“One of the fundamental reasons why so many doctors become cynical and disillusioned is precisely because, when the abstract idealism has worn thin, they are uncertain about the value of the actual lives of the patients they are treating. This is not because they are callous or personally inhuman: it is because they live in and accept a society which is incapable of knowing what a human life is worth.”
“A doctor, like anyone else who has to deal with human beings, each of them unique, cannot be a scientist; he is either, like the surgeon, a craftsman, or, like the physician and the psychologist, an artist. This means that in order to be a good doctor a man must also have a good character, that is to say, whatever weaknesses and foibles he may have, he must love his fellow human beings in the concrete and desire their good before his own.”