When Charles II had a fit while shaving in 1685, he was lucky to be treated with the finest medical advice of the day. He was attended by fourteen physicians who… shaved his head, applied blistering agents to his scalp, put special plasters made from pigeon droppings onto the soles of his feet, fed him bezoar stones (much-prized gallstones from the bladder of a goat), and made him drink forty drops of extract from a dead man's skull. He died two days later.
—Karl Shaw
The greatest mistake in the treatment of diseases is that there are physicians for the body and physicians for the soul, although the two cannot be separated.
—Plato
Doctors don't know everything really. They understand matter, not spirit. And you and I live in spirit.
—William Saroyan
I thought I wanted his love, but really I wanted his pity. I wanted to quit. But he wouldn't let me. "A good doctor can cure your illness, but only the greatest doctor can show you you were never sick," Roshi has said.
—Shozan Jack Haubner in Zen Confidential: Confessions of a Wayward Monk
The best doctor in the world is the veterinarian. He can't ask his patients what is the matter-he's got to just know.
—Will Rogers
Who ever said that doctors are truthful or even intelligent? You're getting a lot if they know their profession. Don't ask any more from them. They're only human, after all.
—Marjorie Karmel
The field of Western medicine has become literally nothing but medicine. Doctors are on their way out, to be replaced by self-serve pharmaceutical vending machines.
—Grey Livingston
In the sick room, ten cents' worth of human understanding equals ten dollars' worth of medical science.
—Martin H. Fischer
Oh, the powers of nature. She knows what we need, and the doctors know nothing.
—Benvenuto Cellini
I have two doctors, my left leg and my right.
—G.M. Trevelyan
My doctors told me I would never walk again. My mother told me I would. I believed my mother.
—Olympic gold medalist Wilma Rudolph
Isn't it a bit unnerving that doctors call
—George Carlin
If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome; if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent; if you believe the military, nothing is safe.
—Lord Salisbury