Quotes About Medicine

Did he know, or only guess at Achilles' destiny? As he lay alone in his rose-colored cave, had some glimmer of prophecy come to him? Perhaps he simply assumed: a bitterness of habit, of boy after boy trained for music and medicine, and unleashed for murder.

Acknowledging the important role of the emotions in health and illness, medicine must reexamine its concepts of disease causation.

The work of Dr. Hans Selye is credited with first drawing attention to how stress affects the body; his research and writing were prolific and stand as one of the major accomplishments of medicine in the twentieth century.

It had been tested extensively in clinical trials in third-world countries;

Focused ultrasound utilizes intersecting beams of high-frequency sound concentrated accurately and precisely on tissue deep in the body, much as sunlight passing through a magnifying glass can be focused to burn a hole in a leaf.

The chairman of the state board of medical examiners was a retired physician who thought that President Teddy Roosevelt was the only other man in the world besides himself who had not been made from a banana.

He'd complained to his doctor. "The beta-blockers are blocking my memories!" Juan Diego cried. "They are stealing my childhood—they are robbing my dreams!" To his doctor, all this hysteria meant was that Juan Diego missed the kick his adrenaline gave him. (Beta-blockers really do a number on your adrenaline.)

Quando chegou a Portland, já tirara as suas conclusões. Era um obstetra; trazia bebês ao mundo. Os colegas diziam que isso era a obra de Deus. E era um aborteiro; também salvava as mães. Os colegas diziam que isso era a obra do demônio; mas era tudo a obra de Deus para Wilbur Larch. Como a Sra. Maxwell comentara: A alma de um verdadeiro médico não pode deixar de ser ampla e generosa.

Before dentists' chairs were invented, the patient's head was clenched between the surgeon's knees.

But even after European medicine changed, medicine in the United States did not. In research and education especially, American medicine lagged far behind, and that made practice lag as well.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, the physician father of the Supreme Court justice, was not much overstating when he declared, "I firmly believe that if the whole materia medica, as now used, could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be all the better for mankind—and all the worse for the fishes.

They had not done the wild things that had no basis in their understanding of the workings of the body. They had not given quinine or typhoid vaccine to influenza victims in the wild hope that because it worked against malaria or typhoid it might work against influenza. Others had done these things and more, but they had not.

Disease began to be seen as something that invaded solid parts of the body, as an independent entity, instead of being a derangement of the blood. This was a fundamental first step in what would become a revolution.

The study of epidemic disease is, of course, a prime focus of public health.

Quinine worked on one disease: malaria. Many physicians gave it for influenza with no better reasoning than desperation.

when faced with desperate patients, doctors often do not have the heart—or, more accurately, they have too much heart—to do nothing.

in 1835 Harvard's Jacob Bigelow had argued in a major address that in "the unbiased opinion of most medical men of sound judgment and long experience . . . the amount of death and disaster in the world would be less, if all disease were left to itself.

Too many physicians continued their adherence to grand philosophical systems

They had not given quinine or typhoid vaccine to influenza victims in the wild hope that because it worked against malaria or typhoid it might work against influenza.

The western world suffered the least, not because its medicine was so advanced but because urbanization had exposed its population to influenza viruses so immune systems were not naked to it.

As the Hopkins medical school was opening, American theological schools enjoyed endowments of $18 million, while medical school endowments totaled $500,000. The difference in financial support as well as educational systems largely explained why Europeans had achieved the bulk of medical advances.

helped lead to a new conception of disease as something with an identity of its own, an objective existence.

They had not done the wild things that had no basis in their understanding of the workings of the body. They had not given quinine or typhoid vaccine to influenza victims in the wild hope that because it worked against malaria or typhoid it might work against influenza.

Reimbursement is a major determinant of how medicine is practiced. When reimbursement changes, so do medical practice and medical education.