19th-century Physician Quotes

I know of no better food for the imagination than the beautiful formation of the human body, constructed of individual bones and muscles, which I know so well and can assemble accurately.

Friedrich Gustav Jakob Henle

Throughout the early Christian period, every great calamity - famine, earthquake, and plague - led to mass conversions, another indirect influence by which epidemic diseases contributed to the destruction of classical civilization. Christianity owes a formidable debt to bubonic plague and to smallpox, no less than to earthquake and volcanic eruptions.

From my numerous observations, I conclude that these tubercle bacilli occur in all tuberculous disorders, and that they are distinguishable from all other microorganisms.

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

The nature of the connexion between the mind and nervous matter has ever been, and must continue to be, the deepest mystery in physiology; and they who study the laws of Nature, as ordinances of God, will regard it as one of those secrets of his counsels 'which Angels desire to look into.'

Robert Bentley Todd

Cats, indeed, appear to regard human beings who may be domiciled with them rather as part of the furniture than as comrades.

Preserve and treat food as you would your body, remembering that in time food will be your body.

Benjamin Ward Richardson

The doctor may also learn more about the illness from the way the patient tells the story than from the story itself.

James B. Herrick

A neurotic is a man who builds a castle in the air. A psychotic is the man who lives in it. And a psychiatrist is the man who collects the rent.

Alfred Webb-Johnson, 1st Baron Webb-Johnson

The first cry of pain through the primitive jungle was the first call for a physician.

Victor Robinson

No man or woman should depend upon another for maintenance and necessaries. Family discord and social degradation will never end till each depends upon herself.

Anandi Gopal Joshi

Sick people need immediate help, understanding and humanity almost as much as they need highly standardized and efficient practice.

Sara Josephine Baker

Walking is probably the best exercise because it is easy for anyone to accomplish and easy to grade from the slowest shortest walks to the most rapid and longest.

Paul Dudley White

Why, there is Mrs. Natty B. Slymm, who is beautifully thin, and she eats twice as much as you do, and does not gain an ounce. You know positively that eating has nothing to do with it, for one time you dieted, didn't eat a thing but what the doctor ordered, besides your regular meals, and you actually gained.

Lulu Hunt Peters

The King's life is moving peacefully towards its close.

Bertrand Dawson, 1st Viscount Dawson of Penn

To please men and to kill parasites are the only uses tobacco-its ultimate effects are the same in both cases.

John Harvey Kellogg

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

The Silurian Period-the grandest of all the Periods,-and, as yet, apparently the seed-time of all succeeding life.

John Jeremiah Bigsby

Bread is a staple article of diet in theory, rather than in practice. There are few who are truly fond of bread in its simplest, most pure, and most healthful state.... Is there one person in a thousand who would truly enjoy a meal of simple bread of two days old?

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

Wilfred Grenfell

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.

Every man must take time daily for quiet and meditation. In daily meditation lies the secret of power.

I believe the doctor of the future will be a teacher as well as a physician. His real job will be to teach people how to be healthy.

It is as great a crime to leave a woman alone in her agony and deny her relief from her suffering as it is to insist upon dulling the consciousness of a natural mother who desires above all things to be aware of the final reward of her efforts, whose ambition is to be present, in full possession of her senses, when the infant she already adores greets her with its first loud cry and the soft touch of its restless body upon her limbs.

Grantly Dick-Read

It was impossible for me to believe that conditions in Europe could be worse than they were in the Polish section of Chicago, and in many Italian and Irish tenements, or that any workshops could be worse than some of those I had seen in our foreign quarters.