Modern medicine is a negation of health. It isn't organized to serve human health, but only itself, as an institution. It makes more people sick than it heals.
—Ivan Illich
Healthy people are always prejudiced against medicine.
—Catharine Maria Sedgwick
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
I told the doctor I broke my leg in two places. He told me to quit going to those places.
—Henny Youngman
We Americans live in a nation where the medical-care system is second to none in the world, unless you count maybe 25 or 30 little scuzzball countries like Scotland that we could vaporize in seconds if we felt like it.
—Dave Barry
One has a greater sense of intellectual degradation after an interview with a doctor than from any human experience.
—Alice James
Let's not kid ourselves. Whatever we diagnose, most patients, if they don't die, get well by themselves. Our job is mainly to try to make them feel better; do no harm.
—Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider
Don't live in a town where there are no doctors.
—Jewish Proverb
[Medicine is] a collection of uncertain prescriptions the results of which, taken collectively, are more fatal than useful to mankind.
—Napoleon Bonaparte
Orthodox medicine has not found an answer to your complaint. However, luckily for you, I happen to be a quack.
—Richter cartoon caption
One of the first duties of the physician is to educate the masses not to take medicine.
—Sir William Osler
The desire to take medicine is perhaps the greatest feature which distinguishes man from animals.
—Sir William Osler
The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.
—Voltaire
Zen is like chemotherapy for me. It's brutal medicine that makes you go bald, but it beats the alternative.
—Shozan Jack Haubner in Zen Confidential: Confessions of a Wayward Monk
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