Quotes About Doctors

The first organized attempt to mitigate the horrors of war, to prevent disease and save the lives of those engaged in military service by sanitary measures and a more careful nursing of the sick and wounded, was made by a commission appointed by the British Government during the Crimean war, to inquire into the terrible mortality from disease that attended the British army at Sebastopol, and to apply the needed remedies. It was as a part of this great work that the heroic young Englishwoman, Florence Nightingale, with her army of nurses, went to the Crimea to care for the sick and wounded soldier, to minister in hospitals, and to alleviate suffering and pain, with a selfsacrifice and devotion that has made her name a household word, wherever the English language is spoken. In the armies of France the Sisters of Charity had rendered similar services, and even ministered to the wounded on the battle field; but their labors were a work of religious charity and not an organized sanitary movement.

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. - W. H. Auden

Cure the disease and kill the patient. – Francis Bacon 1561-1626, British Philosopher, Essayist, Statesman

When a man goes through six years training to be a doctor he will never be the same. He knows too much. – Enid Bagnold 1889-1981, British Novelist, Playwright

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. – John Berger, British Actor, Critic

Nature, time and patience are the three great physicians. - H. G. Bohn

Never go to a doctor whose office plants have died. - Erma Bombeck

Doctors will have more lives to answer for in the next world than even we generals.
- Napoleon Bonaparte 1769-1821, French General, Emperor

A skilful leech is better far, than half a hundred men of war. - Samuel Butler 1612-1680, British Poet, Satirist

First the doctor told me the good news: I was going to have a disease named after me.
- Steve Martin

Doctors are always working to preserve our health and cooks to destroy it, but the latter are the more often successful. – Denis Diderot

The cure of many diseases remains unknown to the physicians of Hellos (Greece) because they do not study the whole person. - Socrates

I recently went to a new doctor and noticed he was located in something called the Professional Building. I felt better right away. – George Carlin

I told my doctor I get very tired when I go on a diet, so he gave me pep pills. Know what happened? I ate faster. - Joe E. Lewis

My doctor gave me six months to live, but when I couldn’t pay the bill he gave me six months more. - Walter Matthau

Be suspicious of any doctor who tries to take your temperature with his finger. - David Letterman

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. – Marcel Proust

The doctor of the future will give no medication, but will interest his patients in the care of the human frame, diet and in the cause and prevention of disease. – Thomas Edison

He who cures a disease may be the skillfullest, but he that prevents it is the safest physician. – Thomas Fuller (1608-1661)