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

Like the burning of the ancient library at Alexandria or the supremely ignorant incineration of stacks of invaluable Mayan codices, the loss of knowledge we are experiencing as the last of the traditional elders pass...

Better to forget, better to let go of the bitterness. I say bitterness is only good in medicine, or if you fry bitter gourd with egg, then it’s dlicious. I told Lan-Lan many times, we...

Unlike modern pills, these hard antimony pills didn’t dissolve in the intestines, and the pills were considered so valuable that people rooted through fecal matter to retrieve and reuse them. Some lucky families even passed...

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

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...

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....

Homeopathy pills are, after all, empty little sugar pills which seem to work, and so they embody [..] how we can be misled into thinking that any intervention is more effective than it really is.

Betterment is perpetual labor. The world is chaotic, disorganized, and vexing, and medicine is nowhere spared that reality. To complicate matters, we in medicine are also only human ourselves. We are distractible, weak, and given...

This year has proven to make those kind of films you don’t need to make them feel like medicine, you can make them powerful and still entertaining.

The health benefits, both mental and physical, of humor are well documented. A good laugh can diffuse tension, relieve stress, and release endorphins into your system, which act as a natural mood elevator. In Norman...

Medicine is not a book but mind, not a business but life

The Biblical writers not only had no knowledge of these things, but they had a perverted concept of life and the universe. Their concept was that man was a victim of blood pollution and his...

Generally places that are comfortable with excellence don’t call themselves centers of excellence. Has anyone heard of a Princeton University Center of Excellence? Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center of Excellence?

It was a lie but he believed in telling lies to people. Truth telling and medicine just didn’t go together except in dire emergencies, if then.

All things are poison and nothing is without poison, only the dose permits something not to be poisonous.

Spanish rain,A maiden’s dress,Apothecary pillsAnd ancient thrills;Melancholy killsA girl’s caress.(—Roman Payne; Valencia, Spain, November 2nd 2012)

At a cardiac arrest, the first procedure is to take your own pulse

One of the first things we teach medical students is to listen to the patient by taking a careful medical history. Ninety percent of the time, you can arrive at an uncannily accurate diagnosis by...

The apothecary’s name was Owlglass. He hummed to himself as he worked in his back room. He’d found a new type of blue fluff, which he was grinding down. It was probably good for curing...

The capital … shall form a fund, the interest of which shall be distributed annually as prizes to those persons who shall have rendered humanity the best services during the past year. … One-fifth to...

My sadness is beautiful. It infuses everything I do. It is at the core of my identity and always has been, just as happiness is in some people. I refuse to be told that it’s...

Prayer is better than pills.

The market for alternative medicine is vast and growing, … This trend must be guided by scientific inquiry, clinical judgment, regulatory authority and shared decision-making.

Death may be due to a wide variety of diseases and disorders, but in every case the underlying physiological cause is a breakdown in the body’s oxygen cycle.

Board certification is another type of certification. That is not a requirement for practicing medicine in Texas.

Disease is the biggest money maker in our economy.

There is no such thing as a special category of science called applied science; there is science and its applications, which are related to one another as the fruit is related to the tree that...

I like to think that when Medawar and his colleagues showed that immunological tolerance could be produced experimentally the new immunology was born. This is a science which to me has far greater potentialities both...

If you desire it, you must punish yourself for the sake of learning, seek every advantage in keeping up with the other clerks and in excelling them. You must study with the fervor of the...

I have to tell you the things I have told you often before; for until digestion is well established, medicine has to be taken.

Burnout at its deepest level is not the result of some train wreck of examinations, long call shifts, or poor clinical evaluations. It is the sum total of hundreds and thousands of tiny betrayals of...

Seeing modern health care from the other side, I can say that it is clearly not set up for the patient. It is frequently a poor arrangement for doctors as well, but that does not...

[American ambulance crews] salvaged people we’d never see in Missing, because no one would have tied to bring them to a hospital. Judging someone to be beyond help never crossed the minds of police, firemen,...

Not only in antiquity but in our own times also laws have been passed…to secure good conditions for workers; so it is right that the art of medicine should contribute its portion for the benefit...

Money spent on expensive and unproved magnet therapy might be better spent on evidence-based medicine.

As to diseases, make a habit of two things — to help, or at least, to do no harm.

It must be dawn, and the last breath went out of this body on the table – how long before? Irretrievably gone from this world, as dead as though she had lived a thousand years...

A modern hospital is like Grand Central Station—all noise and hubbub, and is filled with smoking physicians, nurses, orderlies, patients and visitors. Soft drinks are sold on each floor and everybody guzzles these popular poisons....

Encouraging words are good medicine for the soul.

REVIEW: Like a master artisan, Weisberger weaves together threads of anthropology, botany, ecology and psychology in an inspiring tapestry of ideas sure to keep discerning readers warm and hopeful in these cold and desolate times.Unlike...

Until fairly recently, every family had a cornucopia of favorite home remedies–plants and household items that could be prepared to treat minor medical emergencies, or to prevent a common ailment becoming something much more serious....

I don’t like people much, and I like doctors even less.

We took our medicine last quarter and brought our channel inventories back down to about five and a half weeks,

Dermatology … this young daughter of medicine …

In a sense, the Earth is mounting an immune response against the human species. It is beginning to react to the human parasite, the flooding infection of people, the dead spots of the concrete all...

Not today.

Life is choices, and they are relentless. No sooner have you made one choice than another is upon you.

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.

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...