"If a plant has an effect on the body it's because it's got chemicals in it. And if it doesn't, then it's not medicine, it's salad."
— Matt Kirshen

"Always laugh when you can, it is cheap medicine."
— George Gordon Byron

"The greatest disease in the West today is not TB or leprosy; it is being unwanted, unloved, and uncared for. We can cure physical diseases with medicine, but the only cure for loneliness, despair, and hopelessness is love. There are many in the world who are dying for a piece of bread but there are many more dying for a little love. The poverty in the West is a different kind of poverty -- it is not only a poverty of loneliness but also of spirituality. There's a hunger for love, as there is a hunger for God."
— Mother Teresa (A Simple Path: Mother Teresa)

"To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead."
— Thomas Paine

"Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food"
— Hippocrates

"In the words of the philosopher Scepturn, the founder of my profession: am I going to get paid for this?"
— Terry Pratchett (Night Watch)

"Anywhere you have extreme poverty and no national health insurance, no promise of health care regardless of social standing, that's where you see the sharp limitations of market-based health care. "
— Paul Farmer

"Declare the past, diagnose the present, foretell the future."
— Hippocrates

"Let us be the ones who say we do not accept that a child dies every three seconds simply because he does not have the drugs you and I have. Let us be the ones to say we are not satisfied that your place of birth determines your right for life. Let us be outraged, let us be loud, let us be bold."
— Brad Pitt

"We look for medicine to be an orderly field of knowledge and procedure. But it is not. It is an imperfect science, an enterprise of constantly changing knowledge, uncertain information, fallible individuals, and at the same time lives on the line. There is science in what we do, yes, but also habit, intuition, and sometimes plain old guessing. The gap between what we know and what we aim for persists. And this gap complicates everything we do."
— Atul Gawande (Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science)

"Despite all my public misconduct, in the past year, I had learned the Elemental spells, the Doppelschläferin, and the preparation and flying of a magic broom; I had survived two months as prisoner of war, saving the life of captain Johanne in the process; I had escaped the dungeons of Fortress Drachensbett, and after an arduous journey successfully reunited with my double, so preserving her, and all Montagne, from Prince Flonian's rapacity, I would somehow master the despicable art of being a princess."
— Catherine Gilbert Murdock (Princess Ben: Being a Wholly Truthful Account of Her Various Discoveries and Misadventures, Recounted to the Best of Her Recollection, in Four Parts)

"Wherever the art of Medicine is loved, there is also a love of Humanity. "
— Hippocrates

"It is astounding to me, and achingly sad, that with eighty thousand people on the waiting list for donated hearts and livers and kidneys, with sixteen a day dying there on that list, that more then half of the people in the position H's family was in will say no, will choose to burn those organs or let them rot. We abide the surgeon's scalpel to save our own lives, out loved ones' lives, but not to save a stranger's life. H has no heart, but heartless is the last thing you'd call her."
— Mary Roach (Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers)

"If your leg is in a cast, it's really dumb to sit in front of your computer doing unnecessary stuff with it hanging down. Your leg will swell and heal slower, if at all. When you go to your doctor, he/she will give you one of those "you're really dumb and self destructive" looks. Also, "Why didn't you follow my orders and rest?" Your doctor will be right, and so will mine at my next office visit. Elevate, folk! Elevate your mind, your soul, and your leg, in the order needed!"
— Sandy Nathan (Numenon)

"Swords, Lances, arrows, machine guns, and even high explosives have had far less power over the fates of nations than the typhus louse, the plague flea, and the yellow-fever mosquito. Civilizations have retreated from the plasmodium of malaria, and armies have crumbled into rabbles under the onslaught of cholera spirilla, or of dysentery and typhoid bacilli. Huge areas have bee devastated by the trypanosome that travels on the wings of the tsetse fly, and generations have been harassed by the syphilis of a courtier. War and conquest and that herd existence which is an accompaniment of what we call civilization have merely set the stage for these more powerful agents of human tragedy."
— Hans Zinsser (Rats, Lice and History)

"It was a lie but he believed in telling lies to people. Truth telling and medicine just didn't go together except in dire emergencies, if then."
— Mario Puzo (The Godfather)

"Failing to listen to the woman is one of the biggest mistakes a practitioner can make."
— Helen Varney

"Literature is a virus."
— Corey Redekop (Shelf Monkey)

"I emphasize this because some of my colleagues, for whose academic attainments I have great respect, argue" 'You assume too much; this is not proved; this is not strictly scientific. We disagree with your neurology and your psychiatry is misleading, therefore you must be wrong.' My reply has been, with all humility: 'Yes, of course,' and I have returned to the labor ward to be greeted by happy women with their newborn babies in their arms: 'How right you are, Doctor, it is so much easier that way.' That is what really matters to the clinician. He should use the method that gives the best and safest result from all points of view until something better is discovered."
— Grantly Dick-Read

"..my music isn't just music- its medicine."
— Kanye West

"Time and time again, throughout the history of medical practice, what was once considered as "scientific" eventually becomes regarded as "bad practice"."
— David Stewart (Five Standards for Safe Childbearing: Good Nutrition, Skillful Midwifery, Natural Childbirth, Home Birth, Breastfeeding)

"The life so short, the craft so long to learn.
"
— Hippocrates

"On the day I swore to uphold the Hippocratic oath, the small hairs on the back of my neck stood up as I waited for lightning to strike. Who was I, vowing calmly among all these necktied young men to steal life out of nature's jaws, every old time we got half a chance and a paycheck?... I could not accept the contract: that every child born human upon this earth comes with a guarantee of perfect health and old age clutched in its small fist."
— Barbara Kingsolver (The Poisonwood Bible)

""Men that look no further than outside think health an appurtenance unto life and quarrel with our condition of being sick. But I who have looked at the innermost parts of man and known what tender filaments that fabric hangs on oft wonder that we are not always so. And considering the thousand doors that lead to death do thank our God that I can die but once"."
— Sir Thomas Browne, London: 1642 (Religio Medici)

"In 1736 I lost one of my sons, a fine boy of four years old, by the small-pox, taken in the common way. I long regretted bitterly, and still regret that I had not given it to him by inoculation. This I mention for the sake of parents who omit that operation, on the supposition that they should never forgive themselves if a child died under it; my example showing that the regret may be the same either way, and that, therefore, the safer should be chosen."
— Benjamin Franklin

"'The most exquisite pleasure in the practice of medicine comes from nudging a layman in the direction of terror, then bringing him back to safety again.'"
— Kurt Vonnegut (God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater)