American Physician Quotes

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

I have been studying inherited susceptibility of cancer through affected families. The goal is to identify genes that are involved in cancer development.

Frederick Pei Li

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

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

Tobacco is a filthy weed,
That from the devil does proceed;
It drains your purse, it burns your clothes,
And makes a chimney of your nose.

Benjamin Waterhouse

It is obvious to any student of anemia that a beginning has been made, but our knowledge of pigment metabolism and hemoglobin regeneration is inadequate in every respect. This is a stimulating outlook for the numerous investigators in this field and we may confidently expect much progress in the near future.

Hour after hour, they shouted at me, accused me, insulted me and members of my family.

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.

These great improvements of modern times are blessings or curses on us, just in the same ratio as the mental, moral, and religious rule over the animal; or the animal propensities of our nature predominate over the intellectual and moral. The spider elaborates poison from the same flower, in which the bee finds materials out of which she manufactures honey.

Harriot Kezia Hunt

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

Rebecca Lee Crumpler

Food compulsion isn't a character disorder; it's a chemical disorder.

Robert Atkins (nutritionist)

We have yet to beat our drums for birth control in the way we beat them for polio vaccine. We are still unable to put babies in the class of dangerous epidemics, even though this is the exact truth.

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

There's nothing like a little physical pain to keep your mind off your emotional problems.

Children in home-school conflict situations often receive a double message from their parents: "The school is the hope for your future, listen, be good and learn" and "the school is your enemy...." Children who receive the "school is the enemy" message often go after the enemy--act up, undermine the teacher, undermine the school program, or otherwise exercise their veto power.

Bacteria and parasites cannot cause disease processes unless they find their own peculiar morbid soil in which to grow and multiply.

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

Men, accustomed to think of men as possessing sex attributes and other things besides, are accustomed to think of women as having sex, and nothing else.

Mary Corinna Putnam Jacobi

I have a philosophy, you do the best you can, and the things you can't do anything about, don't give any thought to them. … I feel I have to make a contribution. When I was doing surgery, I made it by operating. Now I try to make it by speaking about preventive medicine.

Ellsworth Wareham

No man [can] become a nice, discriminating, and eminent botanist, without possessing that acumen in perception in proportion, colour, harmony of design, and obscure differences in the objects of the vegetable world, which alone belong to the eye of the painter.

Benjamin Smith Barton

Where silly quacks are most respected, there honest doctors are neglected. Petty Attorneys and Quack Doctors are like Wolves and scabbed Sheep among the Flock. One devours and the other breeds the rot.

The death of medical men is an occurrence which eminently demands our attention, for it speaks to us of our science, and of ourselves. It reminds us, that we, in turn, are to become victims of the incompetency of our own art.

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

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

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.