The art of medicine consists of amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.
— Voltaire
Through Love all that is bitter will be sweet, Through Love all that is copper will be gold, Through Love all dregs will become wine, through Love all pain will turn to medicine.
— Rumi
Childhood vaccines are one of the great triumphs of modern medicine. Indeed, parents whose children are vaccinated no longer have to worry about their child’s death or disability from whooping cough, polio, diphtheria, hepatitis, or a host of other infections.
— Ezekiel Emanuel
There is no medicine like hope, no incentive so great, and no tonic so powerful as expectation of something tomorrow.
— Orison Swett Marden
“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
“Medicine is my lawful wife, and literature is my mistress. When I get fed up with one, I spend the night with the other”
— Anton Chekhov
“The art of medicine consists of amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.”
— Voltaire
Music is therapy. Music moves people. It connects people in ways that no other medium can. It pulls heart strings. It acts as medicine.
— Macklemore
Wellness is not a ‘medical fix’ but a way of living – a lifestyle sensitive and responsive to all the dimensions of body, mind, and spirit, an approach to life we each design to achieve our highest potential for well-being now and forever.
— Greg Anderson
“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
Whenever a doctor cannot do good, he must be kept from doing harm.
— Hippocrates
“I don’t understand why asking people to eat a well-balanced vegetarian diet is considered drastic, while it is medically conservative to cut people open and put them on cholesterol lowering drugs for the rest of their lives.”
— Dean Ornish
“You are a placebo responder. Your body plays tricks on your mind. You cannot be trusted.”
— Ben Goldacre, Bad Science
The idea would be in my mind – and I know it sounds strange – is that the most important advances in medicine would be made not by new knowledge in molecular biology, because that’s exceeding what we can even use. It’ll be made by mathematicians, physicists, computer scientists, figuring out a way to get all that information together.
— Patrick Soon-Shiong
I think modern medicine has become like a prophet offering a life free of pain. It is nonsense. The only thing I know that truly heals people is unconditional love.
— Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
Psychology is much bigger than just medicine, or fixing unhealthy things. It’s about education, work, marriage – it’s even about sports. What I want to do is see psychologists working to help people build strengths in all these domains.
— Martin Seligman
