Oxford Dictionary of Medical Quotations

Wilfrid Trotter –

British surgeon, University College Hospital, London

Mr. Anaesthetist, if the patient can keep awake,
surely you can.
Quoted in the Lancet 2 : ()

Disease often tells its secrets in a casual parenthesis.
Collected PapersSect. ‘Art and Science in Medicine’

All knowledge comes from noticing resemblances
and recurrences in the events that happen
around us.
Collected PapersSect. ‘Has the Intellect a Function?’

Armand Trousseau –

French physician

Take care not to fancy that you are physicians as
soon as you have mastered scientific facts; they
only afford to your understandings an
opportunity of bringing forth fruit, and of
elevating you to the high position of a man of art.
Clinical MedicineVol. , Introduction

A knowledge of the specific element in disease is
the key of medicine.
Clinical MedicineVol. , Introduction

From facts adduced, we must conclude with the
physiologist (Brown-Sequard) that the
supra-renal capsules are organs essential to life.
Lectures on Clinical Medicinep. (), on describing
Addison’s disease

Medicine consists of science and art in a certain
relationship to each other, yet wholly distinct.
Science can be learned by anyone, even the
mediocre. Art, however, is a gift from heaven.
Attributed

Tung-su Pai

Chinese sage

A dirty cook gives diarrhoea quicker than rhubarb.
Quoted in Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine
: ()

Samuel L.Turek –

US orthopedic surgeon, Cook County Hospital

Orthopaedics is a medical and surgical science
that continues to encompass an ever expanding
spectrum of subsciences each of which appears to
endlessly widen its horizons as new principles
evolve and formerly held tenets are modified.
Preface to Orthopaedicas and Their Application, (th edn).
J.B. Lippincott Co. Philadelphia, USA ()

Ivan Turgenev –

Russian novelist

Illness isn’t the only thing that spoils the appetite.
A Month in the CountryAct IV (transl. Constance Garnett)

Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens)

–

US writer

Adam and Eve had many advantages, but the
principal one was that they escaped teething.
The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead WilsonCh. 

Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a

funeral: It is because we are not the person

involved.

The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead WilsonCh. 

Surgeons and anatomists see no beautiful women

in all their lives, but only a ghastly stack of bones

with Latin names to them, and a network of nerves

and muscles and tissues inflamed by disease.

Letter to the Alta Californian, San Francisco, May

()

If there is one thing that will make a man

peculiarly and insufferably self-conceitied, it is

to have his stomach behave itself, the first day at

sea, when nearly all his comrades are seasick.

The Innocents AbroadCh. III

The higher animals get their teeth without pain

or inconvenience. Man gets his through months

and months of cruel torture; he will never get a

set which can really be depended on ’till a

dentist makes him one.

The Damned Human Race

The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.

Cable to the Associated Press June (), in Mark Twain,

Wit and Wisdom

To cease smoking is the easiest thing I have ever

done. I ought to know because I have done it a

thousand times.

Attributed

David Tweedle –

British surgeon

Surgeons have little knowledge of bacteriology

and continue to use rituals without scientific

evidence. Bacteriologists are out of touch with

clinical reality and propose investigative and

prophylactic procedures which create havoc in

the running of the hospital.

Book review. British Journal of Surgery(): ()

Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo –

Spanish writer and philosopher

Science says: ‘We must live,’ and seeks the means

of prolonging, increasing, facilitating and

amplifying life, of making it tolerable and

acceptable; wisdom says: ‘We must die,’ and seeks

how to make us die well.

Essays and Soliloquies‘Arbitrary Reflections’

True science teaches, above all, to doubt and to be

ignorant.

The Tragic Sense of LifeCh. V

Maximilianus Urentius –

Wherein differs the surgeon from the doctor? In

this way, that one kills with his drugs, the other

with his knife. Both differ from the hangman only

in doing slowly what he does quickly.

Attributed

  · 