Kathi Woe > Kathi's Quotes

“our god, the creator of heaven and earth, is completely mad”
― José Saramago, Caim

“Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.”
― Hippocrates

“Always laugh when you can, it is cheap medicine.”
― Lord Byron

“The art of medicine consists of amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.”
― Voltaire

“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

“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

“Wherever the art of Medicine is loved, there is also a love of Humanity. ”
― Hippocrates

“She handed him a glass of water and two Aleve gelcaps. “They’re anti-inflammatories. They will dull the pain a little bit and keep down swelling and redness. Swallow the pills, don’t chew.”
“Well, I thought I’d stick them into my nose and impersonate a walrus, but if you insist, I’ll swallow them.”
― Ilona Andrews, On the Edge

“I saved a man's life once," said Granny. "Special medicine, twice a day. Boiled water with a bit of berry juice in it. Told him I'd bought it from the dwarves. That's the biggest part of doct'rin, really. Most people'll get over most things if they put their minds to it, you just have to give them an interest.”
― Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites

“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

“The physician should not treat the disease but the patient who is suffering from it”
― Moses Maimonides

“Hospitals should be arranged in such a way as to make being sick an interesting experience. One learns a great deal sometimes from being sick. ”
― Alan Wilson Watts, The Essential Alan Watts

“Good medicine always tastes bad.”
― Ron Hall, Same Kind of Different as Me: A Modern-Day Slave, an International Art Dealer, and the Unlikely Woman Who Bound Them Together

“Though the doctors treated him, let his blood, and gave him medications to drink, he nevertheless recovered.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“When you got a condition, it's bad to forget your medicine.”
― Frank Miller, Sin City Volume 1: The Hard Goodbye

“At a cardiac arrest, the first procedure is to take your own pulse”
― Samuel Shem

“The patient is the one with the disease”
― Samuel Shem, The House of God

“Natural,my ass! The worst poison known to man comes from a tree frog in South America. You cannot imagine how small an amount would be necessary to kill you.and it's natural.Calling something NATURAL is a MEANINGLESS MARKETING PLOY."



"All right,calm down! Maybe I like alternative medicine because it's been in use for more than six thousand years.After all that time,they have to know what they're doing."

"You mean the wacky idea that somehow in the distant past people had more scientific wisdom than they do today?That's both crazy and counterintuitive.Six thousand years ago people thought thunder was a bunch of gods moving around furniture."

-Conversation btw Dr.Jack Stapleton and Vinnie”
― Robin Cook, Intervention

“Healing is a biological process, not an art. It is as much a function of the living organism as respiration, digestion, circulation, excretion, cell proliferation, or nerve activity. It is a ceaseless process, as constant as the turning of the earth on its axis. Man can neither duplicate nor imitate nor provide a substitute for the process. All schools of healing are frauds.”
― Herbert M. Shelton, Fasting for Renewal of Life

“There is no body cavity that cannot be reached with a number fourteen needle and a good strong arm.”
― Samuel Shem, The House of God

“The doctors found out that Bunbury could not live, that is what I mean - so Bunbury died.

He seems to have had great confidence in the opinion of his physicians. I am glad, however, that he made up his mind at the last to some definite course of action, and acted under proper medical advice.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“You'll be surprised how infinitely merciful they [these tablets] are. The prescription number is 96814. I think of it as the telephone number of God!”
― Tennessee Williams, Summer and Smoke

“First do no harm. -Hippocrates
Second, do some good. -Anne M. Lipton, M.D., Ph.D.”
― Anne M. Lipton, The Common Sense Guide to Dementia For Clinicians and Caregivers

“We expect the world of doctors. Out of our own need, we revere them; we imagine that their training and expertise and saintly dedication have purged them of all the uncertainty, trepidation, and disgust that we would feel in their position, seeing what they see and being asked to cure it. Blood and vomit and pus do not revolt them; senility and dementia have no terrors; it does not alarm them to plunge into the slippery tangle of internal organs, or to handle the infected and contagious. For them, the flesh and its diseases have been abstracted, rendered coolly diagrammatic and quickly subject to infallible diagnosis and effective treatment. The House of God is a book to relieve you of these illusions; it … displays it as farce, a melee of blunderers laboring to murky purpose under corrupt and platitudinous superiors.”
― John Updike

“I love the imagery of struggle. I sometimes wish I were suffering in a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instead of just being a gravely endangered patient. Allow me to inform you, though, that when you sit in a room with a set of other finalists, and kindly people bring a huge transparent bag of poison and plug it into your arm, and you either read or don't read a book while the venom sack gradually empties itself into your system, the image of the ardent solider is the very last one that will occur to you. You feel swamped with passivity and impotence: dissolving in powerlessness like a sugar lump in water.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Mortality

“My life should be unique; it should be an alms, a battle, a conquest, a medicine.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Are doctors who make mistakes villains? No, because then we all are.”
― Atul Gawande, Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance

“One of the first things we teach medical students is to listen to the patient by taking a careful medical history. Ninety percent of the time, you can arrive at an uncannily accurate diagnosis by paying close attention, using physical examination and sophisticated lab test to confirm your hunch (and to increase the bill to the insurance company).”
― V.S. Ramachandran, The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human

“Doctors tend to enter the arenas of their profession's practice with a brisk good cheer that they have to then stop and try to mute a bit when the arena they're entering is a hospital's fifth floor, a psych ward, where brisk good cheer would amount to a kind of gloating. This is why doctors on psych wards so often wear a vaguely fake frown of puzzled concentration, if and when you see them in fifth-floor halls. And this is why a hospital M.D.--who's usually hale and pink-cheeked and poreless, and who almost always smells unusually clean and good--approaches any psych patient under this care with a professional manner somewhere between bland and deep, a distant but sincere concern that's divided evenly between the patient's subjective discomfort and the hard facts of the case.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“Popular medicine and popular morality belong together and ought not to be evaluated so differently as they still are: both are the most dangerous pseudo-sciences.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality