19th-century Physician Quotes

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

Thus, upon the foundations laid by previous investigators, do medical art and science build a structure which will in its turn be the foundation of future knowledge.

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.

Two souls and bodies seem as one, supported and floating on some divine stream in Paradise.… This is the real ideal and end of Karezza. You will finally enter into such unity that in your fullest embrace you can hardly tell yourselves apart and can read each other's thoughts. You will feel a physical unity as if her blood flowed in your veins, her flesh were yours. For this is the Soul-Blending Embrace.

John William Lloyd

Simplest of blossoms! To mine eye
Thou bring'st the summer's painted sky;
The May-thorn greening in the nook;
The minnows sporting in the brook;
The bleat of flocks; the breath of flowers;
The song of birds amid the bowers;
The crystal of the azure seas;
The music of the southern breeze;
And, over all, the blessed sun,
Telling of halcyon days begun.

David Macbeth Moir

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

The real secret of an unsatisfied life lies too often in an unsurrendered will.

James Hudson Taylor

A physician is obligated to consider more than a diseased organ, more even than the whole man — he must view the man in his world.

The feeling of justice thus arises out of two errors, namely, because the punishments inflicted by authorities and educators appear as acts of retribution, and because people believe in the freedom of the will.

"The differentiation of the neuroses from organic visceral diseases, Dr. Crohn said, "is one of the difficult problems in clinical medicine. Let him who is proud of his acumen and experience as a physician survey, from year to year, his own record in this respect, and his pride may take, will take, a severe fall. With his eyes wide open to the problem, with much experience with the world, people and moods, and with years of clinical training and knowledge, no one is immune to, at times, mistaking organic diseases for the neuroses, or of falsely interpreting neurotic symptoms in terms of pathological states."

Burrill Bernard Crohn

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

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.

We should be very careful to distinguish between our knowledge of phenomena and our interpretations of them.

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

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

Victor Robinson

A dog gladly admits the superiority of his master over himself, accepts his judgment as final, but, contrary to what dog-lovers believe, he does not consider himself as a slave. His submission is voluntary, and he expects his own small rights to be respected.

Freemasonry... has no pretension to assume a place among the religions of the world as a sectarian "system of faith and worship," in the sense in which we distinguish Christianity from Judaism, or Judaism from Mohammedanism. In this meaning of the word we do not and can not speak of the Masonic religion, nor say of a man that he is not a Christian, but a Freemason. Here it is that the opponents of Freemasonry have assumed mistaken ground in confounding the idea of a religious Institution with that of the Christian religion as a peculiar form of worship, and in supposing, because Freemasonry teaches religious truth, that it is offered as a substitute for Christian truth and Christian obligation.