The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.
The good physician treats the disease; the great physician treats the patient who has the disease.
One of the first duties of the physician is to educate the masses not to take medicine.
It is much more important to know what sort of a patient has a disease than what sort of a disease a patient has.
He who studies medicine without books sails an uncharted sea, but he who studies medicine without patients does not go to sea at all.
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. ~
The young physician starts life with 20 drugs for each disease, and the old physician ends life with one drug for 20 diseases.
Medicine, the only profession that labors incessantly to destroy the reason for its own existence.
If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.
We are here to add what we can to life, not to get what we can from life.
The desire to take medicine is perhaps the greatest feature which distinguishes man from animals.
To array a man's will against his sickness is the supreme art of medicine.
The doctor may also learn more about the illness from the way the patient tells the story than from the story itself.
People pay the doctor for his trouble; for his kindness they still remain in his debt.
It cannot be too often or too forcibly brought home to us that the hope of the profession is with the men who do its daily work in general practice.
Medicine is learned by the bedside and not in the classroom. Let not your conceptions of disease come from words heard in the lecture room or read from the book. See, and then reason and compare and control. But see first.
In the last century the practice of medicine has become no more than an adjunct to the pharmaceutical industry and the other aspects of the huge, powerful and immensely profitable health care industry. Medicine is no longer an independent profession. Doctors have become nothing more than a link connecting the pharmaceutical industry to the consumer.
The state of healthcare today is that we are busy in the practice of medicine vs. being in the science of medicine.
We profess to teach the principles and practice of medicine, or, in other words, the science and art of medicine. Science is knowledge reduced to principles; art is knowledge reduced to practice. The knowing and doing, however, are distinct. ... Your knowledge, therefore, is useless unless you cultivate the art of healing. Unfortunately, the scientific man very often has the least amount of art, and he is totally unsuccessful in practice; and, on the other hand, there may be much art based on an infinitesimal amount of knowledge, and yet it is sufficient to make its cultivator eminent.
Even in populous districts, the practice of medicine is a lonely road which winds up-hill all the way and a man may easily go astray and never reach the Delectable Mountains unless he early finds those shepherd guides of whom Bunyan tells, Knowledge, Experience, Watchful, and Sincere.
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