British Physician Quotes

Joseph Lister

Havelock Ellis

James Hudson Taylor

Clifford Allbutt

Edward Bach

Benjamin Ward Richardson

Samuel Garth

On being charged:

Murder... murder... Can you prove it was murder? [...] I didn't think you could prove it was murder. She was dying in any event.

John Bodkin Adams

As I came down the Highgate Hill,
The Highgate Hill, the Highgate Hill,
As I came down the Highgate Hill
I met the sun's bravado,
And saw below me, fold on fold,
Grey to pearl and pearl to gold,
This London like a land of old,
The land of Eldorado.

Henry Howarth Bashford

Tis reason's part
To govern and to guard the heart,
To lull the wayward soul to rest,
When hopes and fears distract the breast;
Reason may calm this doubtful strife,
And steer thy bark through various life.

Nathaniel Cotton

If mathematics were the only path of science.... Nature would have been illegible for Goethe..

Now cheaply bought for thrice their weight in gold.

The Patient's Ears remorseless he assails, Murders with Jargon where his Med'cine fails.

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

James Hudson Taylor

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

Bearing in mind that it is from the vitality of the atmospheric particles that all the mischief arises, it appears that all that is requisite is to dress the wound with some material capable of killing these septic germs, provided that any substance can be found reliable for this purpose, yet not too potent as a caustic.

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.

Want of Care does us more Damage than want of Knowledge.

Thomas Fuller (writer)

Exploitation and oppression is not a matter of race. It is the system, the apparatus of world-wide brigandage called imperialism, which made the Powers behave the way they did. I have no illusions on this score, nor do I believe that any Asian nation or African nation, in the same state of dominance, and with the same system of colonial profit-amassing and plunder, would have behaved otherwise.

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

Preserve and treat food as you would your body, remembering that in time food will be your body.

Benjamin Ward Richardson

A neurotic is a man who builds a castle in the air. A psychotic is the man who lives in it. And a psychiatrist is the man who collects the rent.

Alfred Webb-Johnson, 1st Baron Webb-Johnson

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

The King's life is moving peacefully towards its close.

Bertrand Dawson, 1st Viscount Dawson of Penn

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.

All the bloodshed caused by the warlike disposition of Napoleon is as nothing compared to the myriads of persons who have sunk into their graves through a misplaced confidence in the value of beef tea.

John Milner Fothergill

It is as great a crime to leave a woman alone in her agony and deny her relief from her suffering as it is to insist upon dulling the consciousness of a natural mother who desires above all things to be aware of the final reward of her efforts, whose ambition is to be present, in full possession of her senses, when the infant she already adores greets her with its first loud cry and the soft touch of its restless body upon her limbs.

Grantly Dick-Read

Five hundred years before Christ some physicians of ancient India, working under the influence of the Lord Buddha, advanced the art of healing to so perfect a state that they were able to abolish surgery, although the surgery of their time was as efficient, or more so, than that of the present day.

To see the Convulsions, Agonies and Tortures of a poor Fellow-Creature, whom they cannot restore nor recompense, dying to gratify Luxury, and scratch callous and rank Organs, must require a rocky Heart, and a great Degree of Cruelty and Ferocity.

George Cheyne (physician)

The use of thesis-writing is to train the mind, or to prove that the mind has been trained; the former purpose is, I trust, promoted, the evidences of the latter are scanty and occasional.

Clifford Allbutt

NCI now actually anticipates further increases, and not decreases, in cancer mortality rates, from 171/100,000 in 1984 to 175/100,000 by the year 2000!

I am convinced that the attitude we cultivate in advance may well determine how suffering will affect us when it does strike.