Quotes about doctors

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.

— W. H. Auden

Cure the disease and kill the patient.

— Francis Bacon

When a man goes through six years training to be a doctor he will never be the same. He knows too much.

— Enid Bagnold

One of the fundamental reasons why so many doctors become cynical and disillusioned is precisely because, when the abstract idealism has worn thin, they are uncertain about the value of the actual lives of the patients they are treating. This is not because they are callous or personally inhuman: it is because they live in and accept a society which is incapable of knowing what a human life is worth.

— John Berger

Nature, time and patience are the three great physicians.

— H. G. Bohn

Never go to a doctor whose office plants have died.

— Erma Bombeck

Doctors will have more lives to answer for in the next world than even we generals.

— Napoleon Bonaparte

A skilful leech is better far, than half a hundred men of war.

— Samuel Butler

Doctors are just the same as lawyers; the only difference is that lawyers merely rob you, whereas doctors rob you and kill you too.

— Anton Chekhov

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.

— Walter Cronkite

The best doctor is the one you run to and can't find.

— Denis Diderot

I observe the physician with the same diligence as the disease.

— John Donne

When a doctor does go wrong he is the first of criminals. He has nerve and he has knowledge.

— Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

The more ignorant, reckless and thoughtless a doctor is, the higher his reputation soars even amongst powerful princes.

— Desiderius Erasmus

The practice of medicine is a thinker's art, the practice of surgery a plumber s.

— Martin H. Fisher

God heals and the doctor takes the fee.

— Benjamin Franklin

Employment is nature's physician, and is essential to human happiness.

— Claudius Galen

The doctor found, when she was dead, her last disorder mortal.

— Oliver Goldsmith

The physician's highest calling, his only calling, is to make sick people healthy -- to heal, as it is termed.

— Samuel Hahnemann

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.

— Ernest Hemingway

Deceive not thy physician, confessor, nor lawyer.

— George Herbert

Life is short, the art long, opportunity fleeting, experiment treacherous, judgment difficult.

— Hippocrates

Whenever a doctor cannot do good, he must be kept from doing harm.

— Hippocrates

What I call a good patient is one who, having found a good physician, sticks to him till he dies.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

It is the duty of a doctor to prolong life and it is not his duty to prolong the act of dying.

— Thomas Horder

I suppose one has a greater sense of intellectual degradation after an interview with a doctor than from any human experience.

— Alice James

My doctor gave me six months to live but when I couldn't pay the bill, he gave me six months more.

— Walter Matthau

I wasn't driven into medicine by a social conscience but by rampant curiosity.

— Jonathan Miller

Instead of wishing to see more doctors made by women joining what there are, I wish to see as few doctors, either male or female, as possible. For, mark you, the women have made no improvement -- they have only tried to be men and they have only succeeded in being third-rate men.

— Florence Nightingale

The first duties of the physician is to educate the masses not to take medicine.

— Sir William Osler

Time is generally the best doctor.

— Ovid

Is it not also true that no physician, in so far as he is a physician, considers or enjoins what is for the physician's interest, but that all seek the good of their patients? For we have agreed that a physician strictly so called, is a ruler of bodies, and not a maker of money, have we not?

— Plato

Cured yesterday of my disease, I died last night of my physician.

— Matthew Prior

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.

— Marcel Proust

The superior doctor prevents sickness; The mediocre doctor attends to impending sickness; The inferior doctor treats actual sickness;

— Chinese Proverb

A surgeon should be young a physician old.

— French Proverb

Physician, heal thyself.

— Hebrew Proverb

Every invalid is a physician.

— Irish Proverb

If the doctor cures, the sun sees it; if he kills, the earth hides it.

— Scottish Proverb

There are more old drunkards than old physicians.

— Francois Rabelais

Temperance and labor are the two real physicians of man.

— Jean Jacques Rousseau

Doctors don't know everything really. They understand matter, not spirit. And you and I live in spirit.

— William Saroyan

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

Every doctor will allow a colleague to decimate a whole countryside sooner than violate the bond of professional etiquette by giving him away.

— George Bernard Shaw

There are worse occupations in this world than feeling a woman's pulse.

— Laurence Sterne

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.

— Mark Twain

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.

— Source Unknown

The difference between an itch and an allergy is about one hundred bucks.

— Source Unknown

The doctor knows what his trained eyes see -- and he says it's the last of the ninth for me. So one more thing while the clouds loom dark and then I must leave this noisy park.

— Source Unknown

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.

— Voltaire

Men who are occupied in the restoration of health to other men, by the joint exertion of skill and humanity, are above all the great of the earth. They even partake of divinity, since to preserve and renew is almost as noble as to create.

— Voltaire

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

— Voltaire

The majority of the diseases which the human family have been and still are suffering under, they have created by ignorance of their own organic health, and work perseveringly to tear themselves to pieces, and when broken down and debilitated in body and mind, send for the doctor and drug themselves to death.

— Ellen Gould White

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?

— Virginia Woolf

Never ask a surgeon whether you need an operation.

— Gerhard Kocher

The relation nurse/doctor is even more complex than the relation patient/doctor.

— Gerhard Kocher

Is my dentist not bound by the Geneva Convention?

— Gerhard Kocher

Nursing would be a dream job if there were no doctors.

— Gerhard Kocher

When a doctor does go wrong he is the first of criminals. He has nerve and he has knowledge.

— Sir Arthur Doyle Conan

When a doctor does go wrong he is the first of criminals. He has nerve and he has knowledge.

— Sir Arthur Doyle Conan

The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.

— Sigmund Freud

The best doctors in the world are Doctor Diet, Doctor Quiet, and Doctor Merryman.

— Jonathan Swift

Surgeons must be very careful. When they take the knife!, underneath their fine incisions, stirs the Culprit -- Life!

— Emily Dickinson