19th-century Physician Quotes

In all sciences, Nomenclature is an object of importance; and each term should convey to the student a definite meaning.

Robley Dunglison

Never must the physician say, the disease is incurable. By that admission he denies God, our Creator; he doubts Nature with her profuseness of hidden powers and mysteries.

Morris Fishbein

Theory is good, but it doesn't prevent things from existing.

Jean-Martin Charcot

The more thoroughly the lover of Nature is skilled in the knowledge of her laws, the greater will be the intellectual pleasure with which he will contemplate them; and the poet who can follow Nature into her secret chambers, and commune with her on her deepest phenomena, will be the poet who has the noblest things to say to the human soul.

It is one thing to build an educational tower in the air at your library table, and another to face its actual appearance under the existing circumstances.

As morphology deals with forms and relations of position, it demands a careful selection of terms, and a methodised nomenclature.

The use of thesis-writing is to train the mind, or to prove that the mind has been trained; the former purpose is, I trust, promoted, the evidences of the latter are scanty and occasional.

Clifford Allbutt

Let it be remembered that there are, in every discovery, two accidents; the accident of meeting with the fact connected with the discovery, and the accident of possessing an ingenious, and, in most cases, a great mind to take advantage of the fact.

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

While respect for life will dictate to the surgeon the greatest prudence — will counsel him to attempt no operation which he would not be willing to perform on his own child — it will also teach him, that if the extremes of boldness are to be shunned, pusillanimity is not the necessary alternative.

John Murray Carnochan

Every art and science has a language of technical terms peculiar to itself. With those terms every student must make himself familiarly acquainted at the outset; and, first of all, he will desire to know the names of the objects about which he is to be engaged.

Augustus Addison Gould

Lest when I am gone you may be at a loss for an epitaph for me, let me give you one - He Fed Fevers.

Robert James Graves

The study of the manifold problems presented by cancer has, in recent years, seemed to offer many more riddles than were previously thought to exist; but the history of medicine has never known a period in which problems could be attacked in so many different ways as those made accessible today by the working methods now at our command.

Johannes Fibiger

The rain was dashing in torrents against the window-panes, and the wind sweeping in heavy and fitful gusts along the dreary and deserted streets, as a party of three persons sat over their wine, in that stately old pile which once formed the resort of the Irish Members, in College Green, Dublin, and went by the name of Daly's Clubhouse.

Let us hope that in the interludes of rhetoric the logic of facts may find a moment to make itself heard. It will teach men... to hold of Nature that her ways are not as our ways, nor her thoughts as our thoughts.

George Rolleston

Before one can become a magician he must learn to control his own mind; for mind is the substance with which the magician acts, and the power to control it is the beginning of magic.

Men, accustomed to think of men as possessing sex attributes and other things besides, are accustomed to think of women as having sex, and nothing else.

Mary Corinna Putnam Jacobi

Discoveries are made by the age, and not by the individual.

The Negroes have little invention, but strong powers of imitation, so that they readily acquire mechanic arts. They have a great talent for music, and all their external senses are remarkably acute.

Samuel George Morton

Matter is the miracle of miracles, the most mystical of all things mystical.

Ronald Campbell Macfie

Drugs have been invented for the patient and the physician: to relieve the former of obeying the laws of hygiene and the latter of inculcating them.

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

Sara Josephine Baker

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

Hitler would go as white as a sheet and tightly clench his jaws, while his eyes would dilate. Everyone in his entourage would get panicky because these fits were always followed by an order to dismiss or to execute somebody.

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