Quotes About Medicine

To Huang Ti's credit, though, he managed, without ever disassembling a corpse, to figure out that "the blood of the body is under the control of the heart" and that "the blood current flows in a continuous circle and never stops." In other words, the man figured out what William Harvey figured out, four thousand years before Harvey and without laying open any family members.

The human liver is a boss-looking organ. It's glossy, aerodynamic, Olympian.

It wasn't until about 1920, he added, that "the average patient with the average illness seeing the average physician came off better for the encounter.

Body snatching and other sordid tales from the dawn of human dissection

Pharmaceutical companies make money by treating diseases, not by curing them.

A Dr. Courtney W. Shropshire, writing in 1912, was impressed to note that by means of "a special prostatic applicator, well lubricated, attached to the vibrator, introduced to the rectum" he was "able to empty the seminal vesicles of their secretions." Indeedy.

changes in the teaching of anatomy have nothing to do with cadaver shortages or public opinion about dissection; they have everything to do with time. Despite the immeasurable advances made in medicine over the past century, the material must be covered in the same number of years. Suffice it to say there's a lot less time for dissection than there was in Astley Cooper's day.

People were swallowing decayed human cadaver for the treatment of bruises. Seventeenth-century druggist Johann Becher, quoted in Wootton, maintained that it was "very beneficial in flatulency" (which, if he meant as a causative agent, I do not doubt).

There was no laudanum and Liddy made a terrible fuss when I proposed carbolic acid, just because I had put too much on the cotton once and burned her mouth.

You can have all sorts of symptoms, with only one disease

The sunset and the gentle moon, the blessed motion of the leaves and the murmuring of waters are all sweet physicians to a distempered mind. The soul is expanded and drinks in quiet, a lulling medicine – to me it was as the sight of the lovely water snakes to the bewitched mariner – in loving and blessing Nature I unawares, called down a blessing on my own soul.

Food and medicine are not two different things: they are the front and back of one body. Chemically grown vegetables may be eaten for food, but they cannot be used as medicine.

The generation that has experienced more peace, freedom, leisure time, education, medicine, travel, movies, mobile phones and massages than any generation in history is lapping up gloom at every opportunity.

For people who might struggle to survive at basic levels, it may be more fulfilling to claim an identity like butch, which does not necessarily require engagement with institutions like medicine or academia, which have historically sought to kill, pathologize, or ignore people of color and poor people (and queers). Most transgender scholarship leaves little room for groups of people or ways of being that do not fit a narrow definition of what is scholarly enough or trans-gressive enough.

We will restore science to its rightful place and wield technology's wonders to raise health care's quality and lower its cost.

That's the only way to cure an illness, right? Diagnose it." She

At the time, few people had or felt the need for private health insurance. Most Americans paid their doctors visit by visit, but the field of medicine was quickly growing more sophisticated, and as more diagnostic tests and surgeries became available, the attendant costs began to rise, tying health more explicitly to wealth. Both the United Kingdom and Germany had addressed similar issues by instituting national health insurance systems, and other European nations would eventually follow suit.

So great was the witches' knowledge that in 1527, Paracelsus, considered the "father of modern medicine," burned his text on pharmaceuticals, confessing that he "had learned from the Sorceress all he knew.

the witch was an empiricist: she relied on her senses rather than on faith or doctrine, she believed in trial and error, cause and effect. Her attitude was not religiously passive, but actively inquiring. She trusted her ability to find ways to deal with disease, pregnancy, and childbirth—whether through medications or charms.

Six witnesses affirmed that Jacoba had cured them, even after numerous doctors had given up, and one patient declared that she was wiser in the art of surgery and medicine than any master physician or surgeon in Paris. But these testimonials were used against her, for the charge was not that she was incompetent, but that—as a woman—she dared to cure at all.

For most people, throughout most of the twentieth century, medical care necessarily involved an encounter with a social superior—a white male from a relatively privileged background.

The doctor's detachment is not a defense against excessive empathy, but a "downright negative" emotional stance

Their first target was not the peasant healer, but the better off, literate woman healer who competed for the same urban clientele as that of the university-trained doctors.

On the day I swore to uphold the Hippocratic oath, the small hairs on the back of my neck stood up as I waited for lightning to strike. Who was I, vowing calmly among all these necktied young men to steal life out of nature's jaws, every old time we got half a chance and a paycheck?... I could not accept the contract: that every child born human upon this earth comes with a guarantee of perfect health and old age clutched in its small fist.