20th-century Physician Quotes

A. J. Cronin

Josef Mengele

Severo Ochoa

Christiaan Barnard

James Black

Max Theiler

Roger Bannister

In medical practice, there are few surgical procedures given so little attention and so underrated in its potential hazard as abortion.

The true physician has a Shakespearean breadth of interest in the wise and the foolish, the proud and the humble, the stoic hero and the whining rouge. He cares for people.

Tinsley R. Harrison

Animals who die for your dinner table die alone, in terror, in sadness and in pain. The killing is merciless and inhumane. … Animals suffer from pain and fear just as much as you do. Most spend their last hours locked in a truck, packed into a cage with hundreds of other terrified animals and then cruelly pushed into a blood soaked death chamber. Animals which are a year old are often far more rational – and capable of logical thought – than six-week-old babies. Pigs and sheep are far more intelligent than small children.

As an adult she had her organs removed one by one. Now she is a mere shell with symptoms where her organs used to be.

William Osler Abbott

Stories, we all have stories. Nature does not tell stories, we do. We find ourselves in them, make ourselves in them, choose ourselves in them. If we are the stories we tell ourselves, we had better choose them well.

The cynics were watchdogs terrifying malefactors. They tried to expose falseness and conceit. That's why their name is still spoken with a snarl.

Science by itself has no moral dimension. But it does seek to establish truth. And upon this truth morality can be built.

William Masters

Quality without science and research is absurd. You can't make inferences that something works when you have 60 percent missing data.

Peter Pronovost

A coroner must be humane, fair and fearless in obtaining the truth. That is why I have put my head above the parapet.

Montague Levine

A man telephoned a friend at two o'clock in the morning. 'I do hope I haven't disturbed you,' he said cheerily. 'Oh no,' the friend replied, 'that's quite all right. I had to get up to answer the telephone anyway.'

A cis-immunologist will sometimes speak to a trans-immunologist; but the latter rarely answers.

Niels Kaj Jerne

It is time now to introduce my friend Peter Duesberg. Where do I begin? At NIH, Peter is sometimes known as the battling bulldog. He gets his teeth into something and 1 year, 5 years, 10 years, 20 years later those teeth are still sunk in it. [...] He began working with retroviruses around 1966. The next major phase of his work involved his classic studies with Petter Vogt; Vogt the biologist, Peter the biochemist. This really led to the first molecular and genetically defined transforming gene, the sarc gene. A great deal of this brilliant and original, the real critical aspects, was carried out by this extraordinarily effective collaboration through the 1970s.

The modern haematologist, instead of describing in English what he can see, prefers to describe in Greek what he can't.

Exercise can't counteract the damage being done to your body while you continue to smoke. What exercise can do is help you kick the habit.

Kenneth H. Cooper

If we can get cold Coca-Cola and beer to every remote corner of Africa, it should not be impossible to do the same with drugs.

I vowed never again to experiment with such sensitive creatures.

Christiaan Barnard

Women have always been the guardians of wisdom and humanity, which makes them natural, but usually secret, rulers.

Charlotte Wolff

The unprecedented development of science and technology...so rapid that it is said that 90 per cent of the scientists which this country has ever produced are still living today.

Responding to the argument that a plant-based diet is extreme:

Half a million people a year will have their chests opened up and a vein taken from their leg and sewn onto their coronary artery. Some people would call that extreme.

Caldwell Esselstyn

To my mind, having a care and concern for others is the highest of the human qualities.

Peace is not something that happens by accident. Peace is like silence; it is always there. The lack of harmony in our lives is like noise superimposed on the silence. THe issue is not how to create peace, but how to live in a way that eliminates the noise.

Gabriel Cousens

Human beings are not natural carnivores. When we kill animals to eat them, they end up killing us because their flesh, which contains cholesterol and saturated fat, was never intended for human beings, who are natural herbivores.

William C. Roberts

Ina May Gaskin is the most important person in maternity care in North America, bar none.

There is no longer serious doubt in my mind that human life exists from the very onset of pregnancy.

Bernard Nathanson

Love and intimacy are at the root of what makes us sick and what makes us well...I am not aware of any other factor in medicine-not diet, not smoking, not exercise-that has a greater impact.