19th-century Physician Quotes

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Robert Koch

Joseph Lister

Jean-Martin Charcot

Janusz Korczak

William Osler

Harvey Cushing

That little Vernier, on whose slender lines
The midnight taper trembles as it shines,
Tells through the mist where dazzled Mercury burns,
And marks the point where Uranus returns.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

All the bloodshed caused by the warlike disposition of Napoleon is as nothing compared to the myriads of persons who have sunk into their graves through a misplaced confidence in the value of beef tea.

John Milner Fothergill

Bacteria and parasites cannot cause disease processes unless they find their own peculiar morbid soil in which to grow and multiply.

Physiology owes more to medicine than medicine to physiology. Nature in disease performs vivisections for us. The greater and better part of what we know concerning the functions of the many organs of the body is derived from pathological observation and not from physiological experiment.

Selfish prudence is too often allowed to come between duty and human life.

Rebecca Lee Crumpler

There are many good general practitioners, there is only one good universal practitioner — "a warm bed."

There is a vast difference between treating effects and adjusting the cause.

Daniel David Palmer

These great improvements of modern times are blessings or curses on us, just in the same ratio as the mental, moral, and religious rule over the animal; or the animal propensities of our nature predominate over the intellectual and moral. The spider elaborates poison from the same flower, in which the bee finds materials out of which she manufactures honey.

Harriot Kezia Hunt

It is obvious to any student of anemia that a beginning has been made, but our knowledge of pigment metabolism and hemoglobin regeneration is inadequate in every respect. This is a stimulating outlook for the numerous investigators in this field and we may confidently expect much progress in the near future.

Your theory is like an Irishman's wheelbarrow loaded with dirt: it is supported on one wheel - the rest you carry.

Jacob Davis Babcock Stillman

If the results of the present study on the chemical nature of the transforming principle are confirmed, then nucleic acids must be regarded as possessing biological specificity the chemical basis of which is as yet undetermined.

Oswald T. Avery

Sometimes I wonder whether today we take sufficient care to make a thorough physical examination before our patient starts off on the round of the laboratories, which have become so necessary that oftentimes we do not fully appreciate the value of our five senses in estimating the condition of the patient.

William James Mayo

The grave, where sets the orb of being, sets
To rise, ascend, and culminate above
Eternity's horizon evermore.

Medicine, as we are practising it, is a luxury trade. We are selling bread at the price of jewels... Let us take the profit, the private economic profit, out of medicine, and purify our profession of rapacious individualism... Let us say to the people not 'How much have you got?' but 'How best can we serve you?

One of the essential qualities of the clinician is interest in humanity, for the secret of the care of the patient is in caring for the patient.

Francis Weld Peabody

As I came down the Highgate Hill,
The Highgate Hill, the Highgate Hill,
As I came down the Highgate Hill
I met the sun's bravado,
And saw below me, fold on fold,
Grey to pearl and pearl to gold,
This London like a land of old,
The land of Eldorado.

Henry Howarth Bashford

[It is] more important to remove adenoids from the child than it is to remove ashes from the back yard.

Charles V. Chapin

I think that the cultivation of the humane letters has the most distinct bearing on the cultivation and appreciation of science. Science is nothing without imagination; and imagination is most readily kept fresh by literature. What little good there is a mere descriptive person, and in the small facts which with painful toil he accumulates. But let these facts be welded together by thought, their bearing traced by imagination, experiments devised by the mind projecting itself in advance of them, and the plodder is likely to become the great discoverer.

Jacob Mendes Da Costa

it would be useful to show the dangerous errors, to Religion as much as to Moral, of that French psychologist [Victor Cousin], who seduced minds, by showing how his bold and audacious philosophy breaks the barrier of the holy Theology, placing his own authority before any other: he profanes the mysteries, declaring them partly devoid of meaning, and partly reducing them to vulgar allusions and pure metaphors; forces, as a learned Critic noted, the revelation to swap places with instinctive thought and assertion without reflection without and places reason outside man, declaring man a fragment of God, introducing a sort of spiritual pandeism, which is absurd to us and insulting to the Supreme Being, which gravely offends freedom itself, etc, etc.

Luigi Ferrarese

I have always believed that the Good Samaritan went across the road to the wounded man just because he wanted to.

Wilfred Grenfell

The man who is convinced that there is something to be gained, will always gain something; and in the most beaten paths something new can always be found, provided it be sought for with ardour and intelligence.

Armand Trousseau

The trained nurse has given nursing the human, or shall we say, the divine touch, and made the hospital desirable for patients with serious ailments regardless of their home advantages.

Charles H. Mayo

We have now the remarkable spectacle that just when many scientific men are agreed that there is no part of the Darwinian system that is of any great influence, and that, as a whole, the theory is not only unproved, but impossible, the ignorant, half-educated masses have acquired the idea that it is to be accepted as a fundamental fact.

But we are learning from the teaching and example of Jesus that life itself is a religion, that nothing is more sacred than a human being, that the end of all right institutions, whether the home or the church or an educational establishment, or a government, is the development of the human soul.

Anna Howard Shaw

Man feels and ponders death as though it were the end, when in fact death is merely the continuation of life. It is another life. You may not believe in the existence of the soul, yet you must acknowledge that your body will live on as green grass, as a cloud. For you are, after all, water and dust.