In the middle of the cemetery is a grassy plane, strangely vacant. There are no granite tombs or crumbling concrete, just a sun-washed treeless patch of green known as “No Man’s Land.” Here 1,500 unidentified...

Is psychiatry a medical enterprise concerned with treating diseases, or a humanistic enterprise concerned with helping persons with their personal problems? Psychiatry could be one or the other, but it cannot–despite the pretensions and protestations...

You’ll be surprised how infinitely merciful they [these tablets] are. The prescription number is 96814. I think of it as the telephone number of God!

Every problem of medicine is a problem of language, and this operation was a malapropism.

The food you eat can be either the safest and most powerful form of medicine or the slowest form of poison.

No doctor knows everything. There’s a reason why it’s called “practising” medicine.

I love the imagery of struggle. I sometimes wish I were suffering in a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instead of just being a gravely endangered patient. Allow me...

Wherever the art of Medicine is loved, there is also a love of Humanity.

The evening was a string of miserable minutes strung together in tiny clusters. Three minutes for a man shot through the shoulder; Ellis put first a finger in the entry wound and then another in...

We cannot be damaged into health.

Breathing is medicine. I forgot how to breathe, but I’m learning all over again.

The Waorani carry out a similar diet with their arrow poison, called curare or, in their language, oomae. This is another amazing product of the indigenous science, a most sophisticated technology that the Waorani extrapolated...

The physician should not treat the disease but the patient who is suffering from it

In these days before antiseptics, doctors themselves also suffered high mortality rates. Florence Nightingale, a nurse during the Crimean War (1853-1856), watched one particularly inept surgeon cut both himself and, somehow, a bystander while blundering...

Board up your homes, make sure you have enough medicine, make sure the car has enough gas,

Be consistent in your dedication to showing your gratitude to others. Gratitude is a fuel, a medicine, and spiritual and emotional nourishment.

Labs, too, can become machines. In science, it is more often a pejorative description than a complimentary one: an efficient, thrumming, technically accomplished laboratory is like a robot orchestra that produces perfectly pitched tunes but...

You are a placebo responder. Your body plays tricks on your mind. You cannot be trusted.

We look for medicine to be an orderly field of knowledge and procedure. But it is not. It is an imperfect science, an enterprise of constantly changing knowledge, uncertain information, fallible individuals, and at the...

I believe one day nano-robots will play an important role in medicine.

Of the many ‘firsts’ with which I have been involved at the Texas Heart Institute —including the first successful human heart transplant in the United States and the first total artificial heart transplant in the...

Physicians, patients, and ethicists must also understand that acknowledging abuse and encouraging African Americans to participate in research are compatible goals. History and today’s deplorable African American health profile tell us clearly that black Americans...

To list all the great discoveries in the field of science and medicine during the past century, such as aspirin, insulin, penicillin, and the streptomycin drugs would require the undivided attention of a medical historian...

Before the counter-culture revolutionary Li Lian was executed in 1971 for criticising the Cultural Revolution, pour policemen pushed her face against the window of a truck, lifted her shirt and cut out her kidneys with...

People like to get their medicine here.

This is alchemy, and this is the office of Vulcan; he is the apothecary and chemist of the medicine.

…by the end of my first week as an intern, I am just about ready to throw my pager out the window. A high window. Overlooking a trash compactor. Filled with highly corrosive acid.

The patient is the one with the disease

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...

These are just reflex actions that might easily confuse the layman,” said the doctor airily. Chidder sighed. He suspected that the Guild, who after all had an unrivalled experience of sharp knives and complex organic...

We found there were people doing acupuncture, meditation, naturopathy and other forms of alternative or complementary medicine … but it was being done in a disorganized way,

First do no harm. -HippocratesSecond, do some good. -Anne M. Lipton, M.D., Ph.D.

Hospitals should be arranged in such a way as to make being sick an interesting experience. One learns a great deal sometimes from being sick.

I had fallen in love with a young man…, and we were planning to get married. And then he died of subacute bacterial endocarditis… Two years later with the advent of penicillin, he would have...

I’m thrilled. It’s a total victory for women. Politics was trumped by science and medicine. It’s a breakthrough for women’s health. I think this is so major, not only for the women of the United...

Medicine is not a science; it is empiricism founded on a network of blunders.

My book contains texts that I wrote during college, medical school and during my residency of neurosurgery. I could set the book �Thoughts from the hospital” as clippings thoughts

Medicine, I have reason since to notice more than once, remains an imperfect art.

We are a group of medical professionals, but this is not medicine. Just because it is a procedure we do does not mean it is right.

Nature had found the perfect place to hide the yellow fever virus. It seeded itself and grew in the blood, blooming yellow and running red.

How do they find out with the experiments?”…one way they can find out a whole lot is to make an animal ill and then try different ways to make it better until they find one...

Just like your body and lifestyle can be healthy or unhealthy, the same is true with your beliefs. Your beliefs can be your medicine or your poison.

I’m a diabetic, and I needed my insulin. The first day we were here, I went to the Wal-Mart pharmacy to give them my information just to get the process started, but they gave me...

Surely you couldn’t be a good doctor and a terrible human being—surely the laws of man, if not God, didn’t allow it.

Every medicine is vain.

Is it really that important? It’s just television, for God’s sake. It’s not medicine or something.

Declare the past, diagnose the present, foretell the future.

It is not kindness to tell patients that need strong medicine that nothing serious is wrong with them.

Anatomy is to physiology as geography is to history; it describes the theatre of events.

Reply when questioned on the safety of the polio vaccine he developed:It is safe, and you can’t get safer than safe.