19th-century Physician Quotes

There is some secret stirring in the world, / A thought that seeks impatiently its word.

Thomas Lovell Beddoes

In science, all sorts of things present themselves and you watch them; the facts are tested, accepted, rejected, or set aside, and at last experiments are made following some apparently fruitful ideas.

Silas Weir Mitchell

Life's race well run,
Life's work well done,
Life's victory won,
Now cometh rest.

Edward Hazen Parker

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

Bertrand Dawson, 1st Viscount Dawson of Penn

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

John Jeremiah Bigsby

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

To find health should be the object of the doctor. Any one can find disease.

Andrew Taylor Still

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.

When the patient dies the kidneys may go to the pathologist, but while he lives the urine is ours. It can provide us day by day, month by month, and year by year, with a serial story of the major events going on within the kidney.

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

Five hundred years before Christ some physicians of ancient India, working under the influence of the Lord Buddha, advanced the art of healing to so perfect a state that they were able to abolish surgery, although the surgery of their time was as efficient, or more so, than that of the present day.

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

John Harvey Kellogg

If mathematics were the only path of science.... Nature would have been illegible for Goethe..

The rights of no oppressed people have ever yet been obtained by a voluntary act of justice on the part of the oppressors.

German erudition of his time he held in little esteem. They go to work like galley slaves, was his charge. They do not write on a theme because inspired; but the theme comes first, and with assiduous and laborious study they hope to evolve something brilliant out of it.

It is strange how the memory of a man may float to posterity on what he would have himself regarded as the most trifling of his works.

Like restless birds, the breath of coming rain
Creeps, lilac-laden, up the village street

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

Government is nothing but the regulated injustice that every rascal has in his heart.

If an idea is true, it belongs equally to all who are capable of understanding it.

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

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

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?

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

Benjamin Ward Richardson

Bearing in mind that it is from the vitality of the atmospheric particles that all the mischief arises, it appears that all that is requisite is to dress the wound with some material capable of killing these septic germs, provided that any substance can be found reliable for this purpose, yet not too potent as a caustic.