American Physician Quotes

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.

In Harlem, black was white. You had rights that could not be denied you; you had privileges, protected by law. And you had money. Everybody in Harlem had money. It was a land of plenty.

I think that the cultivation of the humane letters has the most distinct bearing on the cultivation and appreciation of science. Science is nothing without imagination; and imagination is most readily kept fresh by literature. What little good there is a mere descriptive person, and in the small facts which with painful toil he accumulates. But let these facts be welded together by thought, their bearing traced by imagination, experiments devised by the mind projecting itself in advance of them, and the plodder is likely to become the great discoverer.

Jacob Mendes Da Costa

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

In regard to masturbation, I think that it is something that is a part of human sexuality and it's a part of something that perhaps should be taught. But we've not even taught our children the very basics. And I feel we have tried ignorance for a very long time and it's time we try education.

Joycelyn Elders

In my experience, the more people have, the less likely they are to be contented. Indeed, there is abundant evidence that depression is a 'disease of affluence', a disorder of modern life in the industrialized world.

Because until we write it down, we don't know what is actually at the root of our lives.

George A. Sheehan

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

Selfish prudence is too often allowed to come between duty and human life.

Rebecca Lee Crumpler

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

Peter Pronovost

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

William Masters

The safest and most prudent of bets to lay money on is surprise. There is a very high probability that whatever astonishes us in biology today will turn out to be useable, and useful, tomorrow.

These testimonies establish once and for all that we are not alone. Technologies related to extraterrestrial phenomena are capable of providing solutions to the global energy crisis, and other environmental and security challenges.

Steven M. Greer

A lot of the appeal of internal medicine is Sherlockian—solving the case from the clues. We are detectives; we revel in the process of figuring it all out. It's what doctors most love to do.

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

Bernard Nathanson

Our attitudes, opinions, beliefs and judgments are, simply put, our attitudes, opinions, beliefs and judgments. They are not universal truths.

Robert J. White

If the results of the present study on the chemical nature of the transforming principle are confirmed, then nucleic acids must be regarded as possessing biological specificity the chemical basis of which is as yet undetermined.

Oswald T. Avery

Facts are more persuasive than arguments, however ingeniously made, and by their eloquence...

William Beaumont

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

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

Andrew Taylor Still

What thoughts are so important that it is worth holding on to them even when they make you miserable? Why are you holding on? You are in charge of your thoughts and feelings. If you are willing to search for the reason that you can't let go of disturbing thoughts, you can learn about yourself and restore your own peace of mind.

Bernie S. Siegel

One cannot separate the health of the individual from the health of the community, from the health of the world.

Because it expresses intense feelings in words rather than actions, Freud commented that the first man to hurl an insult rather than a spear was the founder of civilization.

W. Walter Menninger

By the intelligent application of antimosquito measures combined with vaccination, public-health officials have now the means available to render what was once a prevalent epidemic disease to one which is now a comparatively rare infection of man.

Sometimes I wonder whether today we take sufficient care to make a thorough physical examination before our patient starts off on the round of the laboratories, which have become so necessary that oftentimes we do not fully appreciate the value of our five senses in estimating the condition of the patient.

William James Mayo