Medicine Doctor Quotes & Sayings

If your leg is in a cast, it's really dumb to sit in front of your computer doing unnecessary stuff with it hanging down. Your leg will swell and heal slower, if at all. When you go to your doctor, he/she will give you one of those "you're really dumb and self destructive" looks. Also, "Why didn't you follow my orders and rest?" Your doctor will be right, and so will mine at my next office visit. Elevate, folk! Elevate your mind, your soul, and your leg, in the order needed! — Sandy Nathan

Your swoonin' needs work." his accent was back. "so does your alias," I snapped. "Dr.Smith? Seriously? Why not John Doe? And how is it that everybody around here seems to buy you're a doctor? you don't look enough to drink, let alone practice medicine — Erica O'Rourke

It is astonishing with how little reading a doctor can practice medicine, but is not astonishing how badly he may do it. — William Osler

I'm up all night against my will My medicine won't let me feel anything at all The doctor gave me sleeping pills and I took one Then I feel all alone, sleeping like a stone. — Joseph Arthur

It's supposed to be a secret, but I'll tell you anyway. We doctors do nothing. We only help. And encourage the doctor within. — Albert Schweitzer

My son Asclepius had become the god of medicine by the time he was fifteen, and I couldn't have been happier for him. It left me time for my other interests. Besides, it's every god's dream to have a child who grows up to be a doctor. — Rick Riordan

We were in Jon's car. "I have the first part I need. The pain-killer. You see I had to go to a doctor for an ingrown toenail. He operated. Then he gave me a pain-killer afterwards. It worked great..."
"Where are we going?"
"You'll see. Anyhow, I had to go back to get the toe checked. I said to the doctor, 'That pain-killer was great, it lasted ten hours. Tell me about it.' He told me about it. Then I asked him, 'Can I see it?' And he took me to this medicine cabinet and pointed it out. 'Very interesting,' I said. We talked a bit more, then I left. But I had a bag with me, a small travelling bag. I left it by the medicine cabinet. Then I left the office, came back. 'Oh,' I told the receptionist, 'I left my bag.' I went to get the bag and there was nobody around. I opened the cabinet and took the pain-killer."
"You can't do this," I told Jon.
"I must, " he answered. — Charles Bukowski

Occult Medicine is essentially sympathetic. Reciprocal affection, or at least real goodwill, must exist between doctor and patient. Syrups and juleps have very little inherent virtue; they are what they become through the mutual opinion of operator and subject; hence homoeopathic medicine dispenses with them and no serious inconvenience follows. — Eliphas Levi

I wanted to be a doctor in sports medicine; I was into sailing and all that sort of thing. — Christopher Atkins

Dr. Xia was working as a salaried doctor attached to another man's medicine shop, which did not give him much chance to display his skill. But he worked had, and gradually his reputation began to grow. Soon he was invited to go on his first visit to a patient's home. When he came back that evening he was carrying a package wrapped in a cloth. He winked at my mother and his wife and asked them to guess what was inside the package. My mother's eyes was glued to the steaming bundle, and even before she could shout out "Steamed rolls!" she was already tearing the package open. As she was devouring the rolls, she looked up and met Dr. Xia's twinkling eyes. More than fifty years later she can still remember his look of happiness, and even today she says she can remember any food as delicious as those simple wheat rolls. — Jung Chang

Be ye a refuge to the fearful; bring ye rest and peace to the disturbed; make ye a provision for the destitute; be a treasury of riches for the poor; be a healing medicine for those who suffer pain; be ye doctor and nurse to the ailing; promote ye friendship, and honour, and conciliation, and devotion to God, in this world of non-existence. — Abdu'l- Baha

Van Gogh writing his brother for paints
Hemingway testing his shotgun
Celine going broke as a doctor of medicine
the impossibility of being human — Charles Bukowski

We may indeed be justly proud of our apostolic succesion. THESE ARE OUR METHODS - to carefully observe the phenomena of life in all its stages , to cultivate reasoning faculty so as to be able to know the true from the false. THIS IS OUR WORK - to prevent disease, to relieve suffering and to heal the sick. — William Osler

I don't want to get married ... I'm certainly not going to give up the work I've wanted to do all my life for the sake of it, any more than I'd expect my husband, if he were a doctor or a lawyer, for example, to give up practising medicine or law in order to marry me. — Gwethalyn Graham

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

My girl was mad and I loved her. Upon a night, she read my poetry; and kissing me madly she cried, 'You are a genius, my love!' To which I replied, 'My girl,' whispering, 'Every doctor in this land with a prescription pad is more of a genius than I. — Roman Payne

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

At 3, I played an innocent game of doctor, minus the stethoscope and medicine bag. — Pattie Mallette

I love my mother.
My mother loves my dad.
Those two facts are undeniable.
I want my father to live.
I want him to fight to live as long as he can.
My mother wants to let him pass.
She does not want him suffering anymore.
She says that I am not there in the middle of the night at home, when he begs her to let him die.
I say that he should not be taking the medicine that the doctor is prescribing, that it made Mike Tyson want to eat his opponents young. — JohnA Passaro

I'm human, we all are - all doctors are - and grieving is a natural part of medicine. As a doctor, grieving is a natural part of medicine. If you deny that, again, you'd get into this trap of curing and victory. I think grief is very important. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Dieter said softly, 'My doctor's love is as important to me as his chemotherapy, but he does not know.' Dieter's statement meant a great deal to me. I had not known either. For a long time, I had carried the belief that as a physician my love didn't matter and the only thing of value I had to offer was my knowledge and skill. My training had argued me out of my truth. Medicine is as close to love as it is to science, and its relationships matter even at the edge of life itself. — Rachel Naomi Remen

Mom did not want me to have anything to do with playing music. Being from a middle-class Black family in that particular era, everybody wanted you to have a profession
a doctor, a lawyer, and so forth. So she sent me to school to study medicine. — Don Alias

Gallows humor is part of having a doctor in the house. Deal with it. — J.R. Ward

May the pain of every living creature be completely cleared away. May I be the doctor and the medicine and may I be the nurse for all sick beings in the world until everyone is healed. — Shantideva

Doubt is an old disease.
Faith is an old medicine.
Compassion is an old doctor.
Concern is an old nurse. — Sri Chinmoy

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. — Ernest Hemingway,

For a while I thought about studying medicine at school and becoming a doctor because I've always been interested in psychology and how people's minds operate. But I'm able to explore some of that as an actor and ultimately I think it seems more interesting. — Rumer Willis

When Republicans are down, in disarray, feeling blue, they turn to a tried-and-true elixir, sort of a Doctor Feelgood medicine for them. It's called tax cuts. — Paul Gigot

What is odd, perhaps, is how the primacy of patient autonomy and informed consent over efficacy - which is what we're talking about here - was presumed, but not actively discussed within the medical profession. Although the authoritative and paternalistic reassurance of the Victorian doctor who 'blinds with science' is a thing of the past in medicine, the success of the alternative therapy movement - whose practitioners mislead, mystify and blind their patients with sciencey-sounding 'authoritative' explanations, like the most patronising Victorian doctor imaginable - suggests that there may still be a market for that kind of approach. — Ben Goldacre

I was sure I was going to be a doctor of global health or tropical medicine in some underdeveloped country. — Thomas R. Insel

Giving is better than receiving, 'cause that's the ability you give somebody to get stronger than they would be, than they could be, than they should be, before you loved them. When you give somebody the ability to feel your love and your healing, you're a doctor in the spirit, bringin' medicine from God to your heart and on to them. — Gary Busey

I was diagnosed with ADHD twice. I didn't believe the first doctor who told me, and I had a whole theory that ADHD was just something they invented to make you pay for medicine, but then the second doctor told me I had it. — Solange Knowles

You look at me and judge me. And I just want to ask, for what? I am in full control. No one has a gun to my head. Why can't this be my profession,one I have chosen for myself? I tell you prostitutes are professional in their skills and practise it like the vocation of true apostles- and why shouldn't they? What's so different from the accountant or the doctor selling his time? I ended up in this profession in the same way someone might end up being a lawyer because the couldn't get into engineering or dentistry,or because they couldn't get into medicine, or even a banker who grew up telling everyone they want to be a soccer player. They do those things because that was what was available for heir talents and their circumstances at that time. But do we pity them? No, because that's lif- — Panashe Chigumadzi

I knew at university that medicine was just not for me. I saved many lives by not being a doctor! — Zubin Mehta

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. — Samuel Shem

She had added medicine because her brother-in-law practised it, but did not forget that in her young days no one ever considered the doctor a gentleman. The — William Somerset Maugham

Do you ever miss it, not being a doctor anymore?"
I shook my head, frowned a little. "I really don't. Something delicate and essential broke inside me when Isabella died. It will never be repaired, Kyle, at least I don't think so. I couldn't be a doctor now. I find it hard to believe in healing anymore. — James Patterson

Few things a doctor does are more important than relieving pain ... pain is soul destroying. No patient should have to endure intense pain unnecessarily. The quality of mercy is essential to the practice of medicine; here, of all places, it should not be strained. — Marcia Angell

Good mothers know all about patience. They know about lugging the promise of a baby around for nine whole months, about the effort of pushing and puffing until a head pops; they know about being pinned to a spot, wincing as gums make contact with sore nipples; they know about keeping a vigil over a cot all night, praying that the doctor's medicine will work; they know that even when patience seems to be at an end, more is required. Always more. — Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani

Feeling a bit nervous, as most people do at the prospect of seeing a doctor, I thought I would buy on my way to him something soothing to prevent an accelerated pulse from misleading credulous science. — Vladimir Nabokov

The best doctor gives the least medicines. — Benjamin Franklin

In the history of medicine, it is not always the great scientist or the learned doctor who goes forward to discover new fields, new avenues, new ideas. — Elizabeth Kenny

The doctor of the future will give no medicine, but will interest his (sic)patient in the care of the human frame, in diet and in the cause and prevention of disease — Thomas Jefferson

Certainly the primary imperative of a physician is to be skilled in medical science, but if he or she does not probe a patient's soul, then the doctor's care is given without caring, and part of the sacred mission of healing is missing. — Jerome Groopman

No doctor knows everything. There's a reason why it's called "practising" medicine. — Anonymous

In medicine, we have invented an entirely new healing paradigm. Now we no longer simply look to the doctor and to medicine to heal us. We now recognize what has been substantiated scientifically everywhere from Harvard to Duke to Stanford - that the power of the mental and spiritual consciousness of the patient is as significant in healing as physical factors are. If we apply that same paradigm to politics, we see that the mind and the spiritual consciousness of the citizen are every bit as important as anything that goes on in the government. — Marianne Williamson

The doctors found out that Bunbury could not live, that is what I mean - so Bunbury died.
He seems to have had great confidence in the opinion of his physicians. I am glad, however, that he made up his mind at the last to some definite course of action, and acted under proper medical advice. — Oscar Wilde

Sonny had a quintuple bypass in 2003, when he was fifty-six years old - the last thing he remembered before falling unconscious under the anesthesia was a doctor standing over him saying his mother's cells were one of the most important things that had ever happened to medicine. Sonny woke up more than $125,000 in debt because he didn't have health insurance to cover the surgery. — Rebecca Skloot

I know of nothing more laughable than a doctor who does not die of old age. — Voltaire

The Country Doctor Revisited is a fine achievement. Purporting to be an overview of the practice of medicine in rural areas, it is a splendid portrait of the practice of medicine everywhere. The special conditions that prevail in the countryside as opposed to the cities are examined, and each of these is illustrated by a case history that is as compelling as it is informative. It is presented in a highly readable form that would be accessible to the general public as well as to the deliverers of health care. I recommend it most highly. — Richard Selzer

Nor bring, to see me cease to live,
Some doctor full of phrase and fame,
To shake his sapient head, and give
The ill he cannot cure a name. — Matthew Arnold

Bear in mind that since medications do not fix anything, they allow the underlying problem to continue uncorrected and actually accelerate. Meanwhile, new symptoms and new seemingly unrelated diseases are the inevitable consequence of this biochemical faux pas. Furthermore, drug side effects are the leading cause of death. NSAIDs as an example of only one group of medications, are fatally toxic to thousands of people each year by damaging joints, lungs, kidneys, eyes, hearts, and intestines. And they are covered by insurance.
You and your doctor have been screwed into believing every symptom is a deficiency of some drug or surgery. You've been led to believe you have no control, when in truth you're the one who must take control. Unfortunately, the modus operandi in medicine is to find a drug to turn off the damaged part that is producing symptoms. — Sherry A. Rogers

My father wanted me to be a pharmacist like himself. He had been a doctor, but he no longer believed in medicine; so he became a pharmacist, but he believed in that hardly more. — Claude Chabrol

I'm taking inorganic chem and physics not because I want to but because I have to. Not every doctor wants to be a scientist. Some of us just want to take care of sick people. I can't help thinking that medicine is more closely aligned to the humanities than to the sciences. I can't help thinking that I could learn more about being a good doctor from William Shakespeare than I could from Isaac Newton. After all, isn't understanding people at least as important as understanding pathology? — Michael J. Collins

A new doctor had been sent for, Lazzaro of Pavia, who had administered to Lorenzo a pulverized mixture of diamonds and pearls. This hitherto infallible medicine had failed to help. — Irving Stone

People pay the doctor for his trouble; for his kindness they still remain in his debt. — Seneca The Younger

Before asserting a prognosis on any patient, always be objective and never subjective. For telling a man that he will win the treasure of life, but then later discovering that he will lose, will harm him more than by telling him that he may lose, but then he wins. — Suzy Kassem

One American in seven has no coverage, and one in three younger than sixty-five will lose coverage at some point in the next two years. These are people who aren't poor or old enough to qualify for government programs but whose jobs aren't good enough to provide benefits either. — Atul Gawande

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

Above all else, above the mechanics, even, a doctor should be thoroughly grounded in morality. — M.R. Graham

In the spring of 2009, I was the 217th person ever to be diagnosed with anti-NMDA-receptor autoimmune encephalitis. Just a year later, that figure had doubled. Now the number is in the thousands. Yet Dr. Bailey, considered one of the best neurologists in the country, had never heard of it. When we live in a time when the rate of misdiagnoses has shown no improvement since the 1930s, the lesson here is that it's important to always get a second opinion.
While he may be an excellent doctor in many respects, Dr. Bailey is also, in some ways, a perfect example of what is wrong with medicine. I was just a number to him (and if he saw thirty-five patients a day, as he told me, that means I was one of a very large number). He is a by-product of a defective system that forces neurologists to spend five minutes with X number of patients a day to maintain their bottom line. It's a bad system. Dr. Bailey is not the exception to the rule. He is the rule. — Susannah Cahalan

Sahaja Yoga has cured people from cancer, from all kinds of diseases which they call incurable. How? Just by awakening the Kundalini. Sahaja Yogis don't go to any doctor, they had become doctors without studying Medicine. They treat the basics. While science is analysis, like a tree has got some leaves and are showing the symptoms of some disease they try to treat the leaves. But if you have to treat the leaves, you cannot do any justice, you have to go to the roots and treat the sap! And that is how - that is the only way you can treat the tree. — Nirmala Srivastava

I've always been interested in medicine and was pleased when my brother became a doctor. But after thinking seriously about that field, I realized that what intrigued me was not the science, not the chemistry or biology of medicine, but the narrative - the story of each patient, each illness. — Lois Lowry

By medicine life may be prolonged, yet death will seize the doctor too. — William Shakespeare

I started the nuclear medicine laboratory at UW Hospitals in 1959 and trained radiology residents in the field. It was 1965 before they found a trained MD (doctor) to take over my role. — John Cameron

There is no such thing as an infallible doctor. — Edward E. Rosenbaum

I think of the Dalai Lama as a doctor of the mind offering medicine and specific counsel and cures in the way a great doctor would. — Pico Iyer

Lina had never seen anyone so disorganized as the doctor. She peeked into the medicine room once when the doctor was out and was amazed at the clutter in there-shelves and cupboards and tables piled with stuff in bottles and stuff in boxes and stuff in jars, all higgledy-piggledy. How Dr. Hester found anything she couldn't imagine. — Jeanne DuPrau

In the year 1878 I took my degree of Doctor of Medicine of the University of London, and proceeded to Netley to go through the course prescribed for surgeons in the army. Having completed my studies there, I was duly attached to the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers as Assistant Surgeon. — Arthur Conan Doyle

Our home had many books due principally to the educational interests of my sister and two brothers, all of whom where serious students engaged in professional studies; my sister became a doctor of medicine and my brothers became lawyers. — Frederick Reines

Unhealthy behavior is actually common among doctors, who tend to know a lot about medicine but very little about health. — Sol Luckman

A beautiful literary collection that tells of today's country doctor, somewhat removed from our romantic black-bag image of days gone by, but still fulfilling an essential need in caring for spread-out populations. At times, with today's advances in technology, medicine in rural America looks very like it does in America's cities, but the variety of practices is enormous. The Country Doctor Revisited captures the trials and tribulations of medicine, but also the satisfaction and the extraordinary rewards that come to those who embrace such a practice. — Abraham Verghese

Will you resist the temptation to get a government handout for your community? Realize that the doctor's fight against socialized medicine is your fight. We can't socialize the doctors without socializing the patients. Recognize that government invasion of public power is eventually an assault upon your own business. — Ronald Reagan

In psychology it is very important that the doctor should not strive to heal at all costs. One has to be exceedingly careful not to impose one's own will and conviction on the patient. You have to give him a certain amount of freedom. You can't wrest people away from their fate, just as in medicine you cannot cure a patient if nature means him to die. Sometimes it is really a question whether you are allowed to rescue a man from the fate he must undergo for the sake of his further development. — C. G. Jung

And when I protested a bit more, I remember he said, 'My dear Lady Ponsonby, there's nothing immoral about this. Art is only immoral when practiced by amateurs. It's the same with medicine. You wouldn't refuse to undress before your doctor, would you? — Roald Dahl

At today's prices for medicines, doctors and hospitals-if the latter are available at any price-only millionaires can afford to be hurt or sick and pay for it. Very few people want socialized medicine in the U.S. But pressure for it is going to appear with the same hurricane force as the demand for pollution control if the medicine men and hospital operators don't take soon some Draconian measures ... At the present rate of doctor fees and hospital costs under Medicare and Medicaid plans [taxpayers] are shovelling in billions with nothing but escalation in sight. — Malcolm Forbes

Call me a nature nut. I love nature. I like to walk in nature, I use natural remedies, and I practice natural medicine as a naturopathic doctor in Los Angeles. - Willow McQuade, ND star of Death Drops: A Natural Remedies Mystery. — Chrystle Fiedler

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

Writing was in my mind from the time I was in high school, but more, the idea that I would be a doctor. I really wanted to be a medical doctor, and I had various schemes: one was to be a psychiatrist, another was tropical medicine. — Paul Theroux

So many people are stealing Bikram Yoga. It's like you're practicing medicine, but you're not a doctor. — Bikram Choudhury

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. — George Bernard Shaw

It's actually the spirit helping the spirit; it is the doctor, the bed, the potion. — Franz Grillparzer

This is how most stories end in the hospital. Not with crash carts and sirens and electric shocks to the chest, but with an empty room, a crisp white bed, silence. — Jacob M. Appel

The difficulty with becoming a patient is that as soon as you get horizontal, part of your being yearns, not for a doctor, but for a medicine man. — Shana Alexander

As a doctor, as well as a mother and a world citizen, I wish to practice the ultimate form of preventive medicine by ridding the earth of these technologies that propagate disease, suffering, and death. — Helen Caldicott

While someday the computerization of medicine will surely be that long-awaited "disruptive innovation," today it's often just plain disruptive: of the doctor-patient relationship, of clinicians' professional interactions and work flow, and of the way we measure and try to improve things. I — Robert Wachter

First do no harm. -Hippocrates
Second, do some good. -Anne M. Lipton, M.D., Ph.D. — Anne M. Lipton

The morning bourbon - an ounce of Old Grandad or Wild Turkey taken after the two-mile walk and a few setting-up exercises and the rubdown that usually followed the morning walk - had also become routine. Whether the bourbon was on doctor's orders, or a bit of old-fashioned home medicine of the kind many of his generation thought beneficial to the circulation past age sixty ("to get the engine going"), is not known. But it seemed to agree with him. — David McCullough

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

We can heal our superficial wounds, but how do we kill the pain inside? How can we heal something which no one except us can feel? There is no doctor, no medicine, and no remedy for something like that. People die from sadness almost every day. How can someone be saved from drowning in a whirlpool of their own thoughts? — Bhavya Kaushik

Anywhere from 40% to 60% of people, when they're given a requisition by a doctor to go get tested, don't, because they're scared of needles or the locations are inconvenient or the cost is too high. And if you're not even getting tested, how is it possible that we're going to move toward an era of preventive medicine? — Elizabeth Holmes

Failing to listen to the woman is one of the biggest mistakes a practitioner can make. — Helen Varney

It is unsettling to find how little it takes to defeat success in medicine. You come as a professional equipped with expertise and technology. You do not imagine that a mere matter of etiquette could foil you. But the social dimension turns out to be as essential as the scientific
matters of how casual you should be, how formal, how reticent, how forthright. Also: how apologetic, how self-confident, how money-minded. 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. How each interaction is negotiated can determine whether a doctor is trusted, whether a patient is heard, whether the right diagnosis is made, the right treatment given. But in this realm there are no perfect formulas. — Atul Gawande

The kind of doctor I want is one who when he's not examining me is home studying medicine. — George S. Kaufman

Chamomile- Potent Medicine Pretty Flowers! This flower has many uses including digestive aid, ulcer healing/prevention, boosts immune system, tranquilizer, soothes menstrual cramps and to promote the onset of menstruation. Use an infusion for its many healing benefits. Take 2 to 3 teaspoons of flowers per cup of boiling water. Steep 10 to 20 minutes and drink up to 3 cups a day. Ask your doctor before using medicinal amounts of chamomile. — Stephanie Stuart

My breast cancer was caught very early thanks to my doctor a wonderful woman named Elsie Giogi, who just recently passed away after practicing medicine into her 80's. At the time, she had suggested I go for a baseline mammogram before age 40 because I had fibrocystic breasts. The mammogram discovered a tiny tumor, and it was so small that they were able to take it out very easily. I had a lumpectomy. Unfortunately, they did miss a little of the cancer, and two years later I had a mastectomy. But hey, I'm here, I'm alive, and I'm going to live to be 100! — Kate Jackson

Sometimes sports can provide a medicine that no doctor can provide. — Skip Bertman

The world - not to mention the American Medical Association - is pretty far from accepting this fact, but the person working with the computer doesn't have to be a doctor or even a medical expert. She has to be good at understanding and correcting the computer's mistakes, which is a very different skill. This will involve some knowledge of medicine, brain scans, or whatever, but it is a less comprehensive medical knowledge than what a prestigious MD would have. It may well involve more knowledge of smart machines, how they work, and what their failings are likely to be. — Tyler Cowen

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 disease of the soul is both more common and more deadly than the disease of the body. Just as medicine is the art devoted to healing the body, so philosophy is the art devoted to healing the soul, curing it of improper emotions, false beliefs, and faulty judgments, which are the causes of so much hardship and handicap. To heal the body one turns to the practitioner of the art of healing the body, but to heal the soul there is no doctor to turn to, and each of us is left to become that doctor unto himself. Yet, this need not stop us from exhorting others to imitate us in the godly art, in the forlorn hope that they might transform themselves into better citizens for Athens and better companions for us. — Neel Burton