Quotes & Sayings About Medicine Profession

The apothecary of this country is qualified by education to attend at the bedside of the sick, and, being in general better acquainted with pharmacy than the physicians of English universities ... is often the most successful practitioner.
JEREMIAH JENKINS, OBSERVATIONS ON THE PRESENT STATE OF THE PROFESSION AND TRADE OF MEDICINE, 1810
For — Julie Klassen

In the medical profession a horse and carriage are more necessary than any scientific knowledge. — Honore De Balzac

There are three subjects on which the knowledge of the medical profession in general is woefully weak; they are manners, morals, and medicine. — Gerald F. Lieberman

To those who have chosen the profession of medicine, a knowledge of chemistry, and of some branches of natural history, and, indeed, of several other departments of science, affords useful assistance. — Charles Babbage

Mr Norrell determined to establish himself in London with all possible haste. "You must get a house, Childermass," he said. "Get me a house that says to those that visit it that magic is a respectable profession - no less than Law and a great deal more so than Medicine."
Childermass inquired drily if Mr Norrell wished him to seek out architecture expressive of the proposition that magic was as respectable as the Church?
Mr Norrell (who knew there were such things as jokes in the world or people would not write about them in books, but who had never actually been introduced to a joke or shaken its hand) considered a while before replying at last that no, he did not think they could quite claim that. — Susanna Clarke

Every profession has changed. Journalism has changed. Medicine has changed. Technology has changed and it evolves. The same is true of football. Free agency has now allowed teams to be a dynasty as they have been before. It is not a great thing for the fans, but it is a good thing for the players. — Marv Levy

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

In the words of the philosopher Sceptum, the founder of my profession: am I going to get paid for this? — Terry Pratchett

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

One can use standard principles and textbooks in educating people for law, medicine, architecture, chemistry or almost any other profession - but not for the theater. For, in most professions, every practitioner uses the same tools and techniques, while the actor's chief instrument is himself. And since no two persons are alike, no universal rule is applicable to any two actors in exactly the same way. — Sanford Meisner

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. — Vernon Coleman

To Redelmeier the very idea that there was a great deal of uncertainty in medicine went largely unacknowledged by its authorities. There was a reason for this: To acknowledge uncertainty was to admit the possibility of error. The entire profession had arranged itself as if to confirm the wisdom of its decisions. — Michael Lewis

Any such unnatural union as the mingling of an exclusive system, such as homeopathy, with scientific medicine in a school, ... (will) render every school adopting such a policy unworthy of support of the profession. — Harris L Coulter

Initially I had intended to study medicine, but before going to University I had decided that I would be better suited to a career in which I could concentrate my activities and interests more on a single goal than appeared to be possible in my father's profession. — Frederick Sanger

Like plumbing, medicine is a profession where you learn early on not to put your fingers in your mouth. — Diana Gabaldon

Medicine is a thankless profession. When you get paid by the rich, you feel like a flunky, by the poor like a thief. How can you take a fee from people who can't afford to eat or go to the movies? Especially when they're at their last gasp. It's not easy. You let it ride. You get soft-hearted. And your ship goes down. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Being a doctor, you are not supposed to give vent to any signs of revulsion on encountering the most noxious of odours or the most gruesome of sights. — Anurag Shourie

To my father, business was the highest calling, but to my mother, medicine was the top profession. — William Standish Knowles

Where there were once several competing approaches to medicine, there is now only one that matters to most hospitals, insurers, and the vast majority of the public. One that has been shaped to a great degree by the successful development of potent cures that followed the discovery of sulfa drugs. Aspiring caregivers today are chosen as much (or more) for their scientific abilities, their talent for mastering these manifold technological and pharmaceutical advances as for their interpersonal skills. A century ago most physicians were careful, conservative observers who provided comfort to patients and their families. Today they act: They prescribe, they treat, they cure. They routinely perform what were once considered miracles. The result, in the view of some, has been a shift in the profession from caregiver to technician. The powerful new drugs changed how care was given as well as who gave it. — Thomas Hager

And though you study medicine for a score of lifetimes, there will come to you people whose illnesses are mysteries, for the anguish of which you speak is part and parcel of the profession of healing and must be lived with. — Noah Gordon

Reporters called down every other profession - medicine, law, politics - for failing to meet a level of professional responsibility which they would allow no one to enforce on themselves, and which they themselves would too rarely enforce on their own. Do as I say, not as I do was something you couldn't say to a six-year-old, but it had become a ready cant for grown-ups. And if it got any worse, then what? — Tom Clancy

I have endeavored to show that there is no real service of humanity in the profession of medicine and that it is injurious to mankind. — Mahatma Gandhi

I should never have been happy in any profession that did not call forth the highest intellectual strain, and yet keep me in good warm contact with my neighbors. There is nothing like the medical profession for that: one can have the exclusive scientific life that touches the distance and befriend the old fogie in the parish too. — George Eliot

His overriding life necessity was not love, it was his profession ... He had come to medicine not by coincidence or calculation but by a deep inner desire. Insofar as it is possible to divide people into categories, the surest criterion is the deep-seated desires that orient them to one or another lifelong activity. Every Frenchman is different. But all the actors the world over are similar. — Milan Kundera

There may perhaps be a new generation of doctors horrified by lacerations, infections, women who have douched with kitchen cleanser. What an irony it would be if fanatics continued to kill and yet it was the apathy and silence of the medical profession that most wounded the ability to provide what is, after all, a medical procedure. — Anna Quindlen

Medicine, as we are practising it, is a luxury trade. We are selling bread at the price of jewels ... Let us take the profit, the private economic profit, out of medicine, and purify our profession of rapacious individualism ... Let us say to the people not 'How much have you got?' but 'How best can we serve you? — Norman Bethune

Equally worrying, and far less recognized, medicine has been slow to confront the very changes that it has been responsible for - or to apply the knowledge we have about how to make old age better. Although the elderly population is growing rapidly, the number of certified geriatricians the medical profession has put in practice has actually fallen in the United States by 25 percent between 1996 and 2010. Applications to training programs in adult primary care medicine have plummeted, while fields like plastic surgery and radiology receive applications in record numbers. Partly, this has to do with money - incomes in geriatrics and adult primary care are among the lowest in medicine. And partly, whether we admit it or not, a lot of doctors don't like taking care of the elderly. — Atul Gawande

I think there is a sort of box-ticking mentality. Not just in the teaching profession. You hear about it in medicine and nursing. It's a lawyer-driven insistence on meeting prescribed standards rather than just being a good doctor. — Richard Dawkins

This doctor had no point whatsoever. Medicine was just to make money and never for love of his profession or of the sick. He was careless and thought poverty was ugly. He worked for the poor while hating having to deal with them. For him they were the rejects of a very high society to which he too didn't belong. He knew he was out-of-date with medicine and clinical novelties but it was good enough for poor people. His dream was to have money to do exactly what he wanted: nothing. — Clarice Lispector

Medicine would be the ideal profession if it did not involve giving pain. — Samuel Hopkins Adams

I wasn't sued out of medicine, I wasn't arbitrated out of the profession. — Ken Jeong

In almost every profession - whether it's law or journalism, finance or medicine or academia or running a small business - people rely on confidential communications to do their jobs. We count on the space of trust that confidentiality provides. When someone breaches that trust, we are all worse off for it. — Hillary Clinton

Patient autonomy is paramount to the oath that we take when we enter the profession of medicine. That is why I am appalled when the federal government gets between my patients and their right to the full range of medical information and complete access to health care. — Ami Bera

Several years ago, I realized that I didn't want to spend all my life in medicine. It had me in a sort of spiritual box, like a plant whose roots are getting crowded. I felt I wasn't growing. So I promised myself that I would quit while I still had the energy to get involved in something new. There's nothing wrong with medicine. There's more paperwork, more lawsuits, less understanding between doctors and patients. But it's still a great business. But not for me - not any longer. — Richard S. Weeder

The general public is easy. You don't have to answer to anyone; and as long as you follow the rules of your profession, you needn't worry about the consequences. But the problem with the powerful and rich is that when they are sick, they really want their doctors to cure them. — Moliere

It must be frustrating to survive the gauntlet that is our western medical schooling system only to one day come to the realization that you have been taught only to manage illness and disease instead of curing it. — Gary Hopkins

Why has the medical profession not taken advantage of the help available from evolutionary biology, a well-developed branch of science with great potential for providing medical insights? One reason is surely the pervasive neglect of this branch of science at all educational levels. Religious and other sorts of opposition have minimized the impact in general education of Darwin's contributions to our understanding of ourselves and the world we live in. — Randolph M. Nesse

We'd been assured it wouldn't be painful, though she might experience 'discomfort,' a term beloved of the medical profession that seems to be a synonym for agony that isn't yours. — Lionel Shriver

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. — William Osler

Is advertising a profession, like law or medicine? How many new parents clutch their baby to their breast and declare, 'I want this child to grow up to be a media planner'? — Jef I. Richards

... through medicine it is possible to reach the unreachable - even the ones who most of us forget about or actively try to ignore. This is the power and beauty of our profession. — Matt McCarthy

If you care to be a master or to make a true success of your profession, the smallest detail of your work must be done with thoroughness. To be thorough in medicine means that in the ever alluring present, we do not forget the past. — David Murray Cowie

Medicine, the only profession that labors incessantly to destroy the reason for its existence. — James Bryce

The life so short, the craft so long to learn. — Hippocrates

Massage therapists, and others in the holistic arts ... seem to be a particularly gullible bunch. And there are a lot of people who have seized upon that, and marketed their products, their classes, their modalities, and their wild claims to us ... and many of us have fallen for it, hook, line and sinker ... and unfortunately, gone on to convince our clients to buy into it, as well ... Our profession has turned into the snake oil medicine show. — Laura Allen

A shoemaker, in making a pair of shoes, cannot spoil a scrap of leather without having to bear the loss; but in our business we may spoil a man without its costing us a farthing. The blunders are never put down to us, and it is always the fault of the fellow who dies. The best of this profession is, that there is the greatest honesty and discretion among the dead; for you never find them complain of the physician who has killed them. — Moliere

Yet the denial of feelings is one way of blocking the chronic depression that can descend like a dense fog on those who deal day after day with sickness and death. It is better than not caring at all, better than burning out. Only a few are tough enough to maintain both equanimity and caring for a lifetime; these renowned nurses and legendary physicians are saints of the medical profession. Copper knew a few of them, and he wished he could be more like them. It took a lot of growing up. — Richard S. Weeder

We have to ask ourselves whether medicine is to remain a humanitarian and respected profession or a new but depersonalized science in the service of prolonging life rather than diminishing human suffering. — Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

Doctors tend to enter the arenas of their profession's practice with a brisk good cheer that they have to then stop and try to mute a bit when the arena they're entering is a hospital's fifth floor, a psych ward, where brisk good cheer would amount to a kind of gloating. This is why doctors on psych wards so often wear a vaguely fake frown of puzzled concentration, if and when you see them in fifth-floor halls. And this is why a hospital M.D.
who's usually hale and pink-cheeked and poreless, and who almost always smells unusually clean and good
approaches any psych patient under this care with a professional manner somewhere between bland and deep, a distant but sincere concern that's divided evenly between the patient's subjective discomfort and the hard facts of the case. — David Foster Wallace

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 am in a profession that has succeeded because of its ability to fix. If your problem is fixable, we know just what to do. But if it's not? The fact that we have had no adequate answers to this question is troubling and has caused callousness, inhumanity, and extraordinary suffering. — Atul Gawande

Dr. Buford's profession was medicine and his obsession was anything that grew in the ground, so he stayed poor. — Harper Lee

The interaction with the unaccountable, self-regulating business called "modern medicine" is analogous to buying a used car from a stranger: you never really know what you're getting because of the things you're not being told. And what is not being disclosed can (seriously) hurt you.
(in "The Mammogram Myth: The Independent Investigation Of Mammography The Medical Profession Doesn't Want You To Know About", 2013) — Rolf Hefti

Doctors, like all other people, are subject to prejudice and discrimination. While bias can be a problem in any profession, in medicine, the stakes are much higher. — Damon Tweedy

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