Quotes About Medicine

Whoever said "laughter is the best medicine" never had gonorrhea.

Radium was a clever poison. It masked its way inside its victims' bones; it foxed the most experienced physicians. And like the expert serial killer it was, it had now evolved its modus operandi.

Submerging the body in water while washing it was a lost practice, and people recovered it gropingly and tentatively. That a doctor would write an article in 1861 called "Baths and How to Take Them" may seem slightly comical to us, but her audience was grateful for professional guidance through unfamiliar territory.

When the Viennese doctor Ignaz Semmelweis insisted that delivery room doctors and medical students wash their hands before attending their patients, he was ridiculed, even though the practice dramatically reduced death from puerperal sepsis. In 1865, when Semmelweis died, his simple but radical idea was still discounted.

The bath, except for medical reasons when absolutely necessary, is not only superfluous, but very prejudicial to men," the French doctor Théophraste Renaudot warned in 1655. "Bathing fills the head with vapors. It is the enemy of the nerves and ligaments, which it loosens, in such a way that many a man never suffers from gout except after bathing.

Prior to penicillin and medical research, death was an everyday occurrence. It was intimate.

It's possible that they had a slight allergic reaction to a preservative in the vaccine.

Some of his colleagues, as he was well aware, even went so far as to say he dishonoured the medical profession. As though it could be dishonoured! There is pain and sickness, agreed. But pain and sickness represent money, and you need money to live, to feel well and look after others. That is the inevitable cycle. When it comes to money, it is difficult to strike a happy mean and stick to it. You either make too much money, or too little. It is safer to make too much.

What saves doctors' reputations is the fact that many illnesses are benign and that people can go on living with a large number of others, the so-called chronic ones, which destroy only slowly.

In many shamanic societies, if you came to a medicine person complaining of being disheartened, dispirited, or depressed, they would ask one of four questions: "When did you stop dancing? When did you stop singing? When did you stop being enchanted by stories? When did you stop being comforted by the sweet territory of silence?

It is strange, you think, how much people hate going to doctors, but how much they love watching shows about doctors.

The aggressive use of new medical tools went beyond castration. Dr. Marion Sims discovered a condition called "vaginismus," in which a woman felt such pain from intercourse she was unable to bear penetration. He prescribed surgery, but another treatment was to put the woman under anesthesia so her husband was able to have sex with her. Sims described one case in which a physician had to visit the couple two or three times a week to anesthetize the woman before lovemaking.

The bottle of morphine is wrapped up and passed to the child over the counter," a Tennessee doctor wrote. Doctors and pharmacists had little compunction about dispensing narcotics. "Young women cannot go to a ball without taking a dose of morphine to make them agreeable," a druggist said in 1876. A North Carolina doctor claimed he had given one patient between 2,500 and 3,000 shots over eighteen months "and so far see no signs of the opium habit.

Just being female made women candidates for perpetual medical care, because doctors began treating all the normal passages of their lives—puberty, menstruation, childbirth, and menopause—as illnesses.

You always get drugs when you go and see the doctor with the baby. The drugs are for me and Mama.

Fear and realisation of ignorance, strong medicines against stupid pride.

A faithful friend is a strong protection. A person who has found one has found a treasure. A faithful friend is beyond price, And his value cannot be weighed. A faithful friend is a life-giving medicine. — The Apocrypha

With continued progress in the rapidly growing field known as pharmacogenetics, it will become possible to prescribe drugs based on each patient's own unique biology.

Apothecaries did about two-thirds of their business in medications for venereal disease

the drugstores were besieged by people asking for vaccination

In engineering or medical science, a deep understanding of uncertainty can be a matter of life and death. In politics, over-confidence is often the norm; uncertainty is seen as weakness when really it is a vital part of decision making. In this respect, science delivers an important lesson in humility. In

The redefined physician is human, knows she's human, accepts it … and she works in a culture of medicine that acknowledges that human beings run the system.

I believe you need scientific proof that something works before you entrust your health to it.

Somehow among all our use of antibiotic medicine and antibacterial soap our souls are becoming sanitized as well — don't let it happen to you!