19th-century Physician Quotes

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Jean-Martin Charcot

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

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.

The hand of man is in no sense a peculiar organ. It is the foot ennobled: that is all.

Charles Bland Radcliffe

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

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

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

Robley Dunglison

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

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.