Physician Quotes

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.

Physicians, like other people, must live by their employment.

William Buchan (physician)

Nor one feeling of vengeance presume to defile
The cause, or the men, of the Emerald Isle.

William Drennan

It is the highest compliment to the ingenuity of a Pascal, a Leibnitz, and a Babbage, in their invention of the arithmetical machine, that there would not be required, in those who use it, more than the dexterity of a turnspit.

William Hamilton

Some physiologists will have it that the stomach is a mill;—others, that it is a fermenting vat;—others again that it is a stew-pan;—but in my view of the matter, it is neither a mill, a fermenting vat, nor a stew-pan—but a stomach, gentlemen, a stomach.

No matter how good you are, you cannot be a scientist unless you learn to live with frustration.

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 perfect physician must have not only the knowledge of medical art but also prudence and wisdom.

Friedrich Hoffmann

Let us hope that in the interludes of rhetoric the logic of facts may find a moment to make itself heard. It will teach men... to hold of Nature that her ways are not as our ways, nor her thoughts as our thoughts.

George Rolleston

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.

[The] seminary spirit of minerals hath its proper wombs where it resides, and is like a Prince or Emperour, whose prescripts both Elements and matter must obey; and it is never idle, but always in action, producing and maintaining natural substances, untill they have fulfilled their destiny.

I know of no better food for the imagination than the beautiful formation of the human body, constructed of individual bones and muscles, which I know so well and can assemble accurately.

Friedrich Gustav Jakob Henle

The earth does not conceal metals in her depths because she does not wish that men should dig them out, but because provident and sagacious Nature has appointed for each thing its place.

Georgius Agricola

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.

Within infinite myths lies the Eternal Truth Who sees it all? Varuna has but a thousand eyes Indra, a hundred And I, only two

Devdutt Pattanaik

For, as the substance of the brain, like that of the other solids of our body, is nearly incompressible, the quantity of blood within the head must be the same, or very nearly the same, at all times, whether in health or disease, in life or after death.

Alexander Monro (secundus)

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

Terrorists do not actually need nuclear weapons. They have been conveniently supplied with 103 nuclear power plants scattered throughout the United States (438 of these deadly facilities exist throughout the world). A planned meltdown at one of these facilities would make the World Trade Center attacks seem like child's play. The massive concrete containers protecting the reactors are not strong enough to withstand the impact of a jumbo jet.

Helen Caldicott

The seed is the fetus, in other words, a true plant with its parts (that is, its leaves, of which there are usually two, its stalk or stem, and its bud) completely fashioned.

Marcello Malpighi

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

Niels Kaj Jerne

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

In science there are collectors, classifiers, compulsory tidiers-up and permanent contesters, detectives, some artists and many artisans, there are poet-scientists and philosophers and even a few mystics.

Rolf M. Zinkernagel

No single food will make or break good health. But the kinds of food you choose day in and day out have a major impact.

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

Bernard Nathanson

In medicine, sins of commission are mortal, sins of omission venial.

Théodore Tronchin