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.
A patient going to a doctor for his first visit was asked, ''And whom did you consult before coming to me?'' ''Only the village druggist,'' was the answer. ''And what sort of foolish advice did that numbskull give you?'' asked the doctor, his tone and manner denoting his contempt for the advice of the layman. ''Oh,'' replied his patient, with no malice aforethought, ''he told me to come and see you.''
A skilful leech is better far, than half a hundred men of war.
A surgeon should be young a physician old.
Cure the disease and kill the patient.
Cured yesterday of my disease, I died last night of my physician.
Deceive not thy physician, confessor, nor lawyer.
Doctors are just the same as lawyers; the only difference is that lawyers merely rob you, whereas doctors rob you and kill you too.
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.
Doctors don't know everything really. They understand matter, not spirit. And you and I live in spirit.
Doctors will have more lives to answer for in the next world than even we generals.
Employment is nature's physician, and is essential to human happiness.
Every doctor will allow a colleague to decimate a whole countryside sooner than violate the bond of professional etiquette by giving him away.
Every invalid is a physician.
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.
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?
God heals and the doctor takes the fee.
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 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.
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.