Scottish Physician Quotes

A. J. Cronin

James Hutton

John Arbuthnot

James Black

William Hunter

William Hamilton

Neil Arnott

It is in vain to attempt to measure a quantity which escapes our notice, and which history cannot ascertain; and we might just as well attempt to measure the distance of the stars without a parallax, as to calculate the destruction of the solid land without a measure corresponding to the whole.

The dumpling is indeed of more ancient institution, and of foreign origin; but alas, what were those dumplings? Nothing but a few lentils sodden together, moisten'd and cemented with a little seeth'd fat.

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

Above all am I convinced of the need, irrevocable and inescapable, of every human heart, for God. No matter how we try to escape, to lose ourselves in restless seeking, we cannot separate ourselves from our divine source. There is no substitute for God.

And it has been sarcastically said, that there is a wide difference between a good physician and a bad one, but a small difference between a good physician and no physician at all; by which it is meant to insinuate, that the mischievous officiousness of art does commonly more than counterbalance any benefit derivable from it.

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.

In the culture I grew up in you did your work and you did not put your arm around it to stop other people from looking—you took the earliest possible opportunity to make knowledge available.

On modern scientific research

Simplest of blossoms! To mine eye
Thou bring'st the summer's painted sky;
The May-thorn greening in the nook;
The minnows sporting in the brook;
The bleat of flocks; the breath of flowers;
The song of birds amid the bowers;
The crystal of the azure seas;
The music of the southern breeze;
And, over all, the blessed sun,
Telling of halcyon days begun.

David Macbeth Moir

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)

No man can understand a subject of which he does not carry a distinct outline in his mind.

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

William Buchan (physician)

As morphology deals with forms and relations of position, it demands a careful selection of terms, and a methodised nomenclature.