Hoyt & Roberts, comps. Hoyt’s New Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations. 1922.
Medicine
Medicus carat, Natura sanat morbus.
The physician heals, Nature makes well.
Idea in Aristotle—Nicomachean Ethics. Bk. VII. 15. 7. Oxford text.
A man’s own observation, what he find good of, and what he finds hurt of, is the best physic to preserve health.
Bacon—Essays. Of Regimen of Health.
I find the medicine worse than the malady.
Beaumont and Fletcher—Love’s Cure. Act III. Sc. 2.
Dat Galenus opes, dat Justinianus honores,
Sed genus species cogitur ire pedes;
The rich Physician, honor’d Lawyers ride,
Whil’st the poor Scholar foots it by their side.
Burton—Anatomy of Melancholy. I. 2. 3. 15. Quoted by Dr. Robert F. Arnold. A like saying may be found in Franciscus Floridus Sabinus—Lectiones Subcisive. Bk. I. Ch. I. Also John Owen—Medicus et I. C.
Ovid—Fasti. I. 217; Amores. III. VIII. 55.
’Tis not amiss, ere ye’re giv’n o’er,
To try one desp’rate med’cine more;
For where your case can be no worse,
The desp’rat’st is the wisest course.
Butler—Epistle of Hudibras to Sidrophel. L. 5.
Learn’d he was in medic’nal lore,
For by his side a pouch he wore,
Replete with strange hermetic powder
That wounds nine miles point-blank would solder.
Butler—Hudibras. Pt. I. Canto II. L. 223.
This is the way that physicians mend or end us,
Secundum artem: but although we sneer
In health—when ill, we call them to attend us,
Without the least propensity to jeer.
Byron—Don Juan. Canto X. St. 42.
Dios que dá la llaga, dá la medicina.
God who sends the wound sends the medicine.
Cervantes—Don Quixote. II. 19.
Ægri quia non omnes convalescunt, idcirco ars nulla medicina est.
Because all the sick do not recover, therefore medicine is not an art.
Cicero—De Natura Deorum. II. 4.
When taken
To be well shaken.
George Colman (the Younger)—Broad Grins. The Newcastle Apothecary. St. 12.
Take a little rum
The less you take the better,
Pour it in the lakes
Of Wener or of Wetter.
Dip a spoonful out
And mind you don’t get groggy,
Pour it in the lake
Of Winnipissiogie.
Stir the mixture well
Lest it prove inferior,
Then put half a drop
Into Lake Superior.
Every other day
Take a drop in water,
You’ll be better soon
Or at least you oughter.
Bishop G. W. Doane—Lines on Homeopathy.
Better to hunt in fields for health unbought,
Than fee the doctor for a nauseous draught.
The wise for cure on exercise depend;
God never made his work for man to mend.
Dryden—Epistle to John Dryden of Chesterton. L. 92.
So liv’d our sires, ere doctors learn’d to kill,
And multiplied with theirs the weekly bill.
Dryden—To John Dryden, Esq. L. 71.
Even as a Surgeon, minding off to cut
Some cureless limb, before in use he put
His violent Engins on the vicious member,
Bringeth his Patient in a senseless slumber,
And grief-less then (guided by use and art),
To save the whole, sawes off th’ infected part.
Du Bartas—Divine Weekes and Workers. First Week. Sixth Day. L. 1,018.
For of the most High cometh healing.
Ecclesiasticus. XXXVIII. 2.
One doctor, singly like the sculler plies,
The patient struggles, and by inches dies;
But two physicians, like a pair of oars,
Waft him right swiftly to the Stygian shores.
Quoted by Garth—The Dispensary.
A single doctor like a sculler plies,
And all his art and all his physic tries;
But two physicians, like a pair of oars,
Conduct you soonest to the Stygian shores.
Epigrams Ancient and Modern. Edited by Rev. John Booth, London, 1863. P. 144. Another version signed D, (probably John Dunscombe) in note to Nichols’ Select Collection of Poems.
“Is there no hope?” the sick man said,
The silent doctor shook his head,
And took his leave with signs of sorrow,
Despairing of his fee to-morrow.
Gay—The Sick Man and the Angel.
Oh, powerful bacillus,
With wonder how you fill us,
Every day!
While medical detectives,
With powerful objectives,
Watch your play.
Wm. Tod Helmuth—Ode to the Bacillus.
I firmly believe that if the whole materia medica could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be all the better for mankind and all the worse for the fishes.
Holmes—Lecture before the Harvard Medical School.
A pill that the present moment is daily bread to thousands.
Douglas Jerrold—The Catspaw. Act I. Sc. 1.
Orandum est, ut sit mens sana in corpore sano.
A sound mind in a sound body is a thing to be prayed for.
Juvenal—Satires. X. 356.
You behold in me
Only a travelling Physician;
One of the few who have a mission
To cure incurable diseases,
Or those that are called so.
Longfellow—Christus. The Golden Legend. Pt. I.
Physician, heal thyself.
Luke. IV. 23. Quoted as a proverb.
And in requital ope his leathern scrip,
And show me simples of a thousand names,
Telling their strange and vigorous faculties.
Milton—Comus. L. 626.
Adrian, the Emperor, exclaimed incessantly, when dying, “That the crowd of physicians had killed him.”
Montaigne—Essays. Bk. II. Ch. XXXVII.
How the Doctor’s brow should smile,
Crown’d with wreaths of camomile.
Moore—Wreaths for Ministers.
Dulcia non ferimus; succo renovamus amaro.
We do not bear sweets; we are recruited by a bitter potion.
Ovid—Ars Amatoria. III. 583.
Medicus nihil aliud est quam animi consolatio.
A physician is nothing but a consoler of the mind.
Petronius Arbiter—Satyricon.
I have heard that Tiberius used to say that that man was ridiculous, who after sixty years, appealed to a physician.
Plutarch—De Sanitate tuenda. Vol. II.
So modern ’pothecaries, taught the art
By doctor’s bills to play the doctor’s part,
Bold in the practice of mistaken rules,
Prescribe, apply, and call their masters fools.
Pope—Essay on Criticism. L. 108.
Learn from the beasts the physic of the field.
Pope—Essay on Man. Ep. III. L. 174.
Who shall decide when doctors disagree,
And soundest casuists doubt, like you and me?
Pope—Moral Essays. Ep. III.
Banished the doctor, and expell’d the friend.
Pope—Moral Essays. Ep. III. L. 330.
You tell your doctor, that y’ are ill
And what does he, but write a bill,
Of which you need not read one letter,
The worse the scrawl, the dose the better.
For if you knew but what you take,
Though you recover, he must break.
Prior—Alma. Canto III. L. 97.
But, when the wit began to wheeze,
And wine had warm’d the politician,
Cur’d yesterday of my disease,
I died last night of my physician.
Prior—The Remedy Worse than the Disease.
Physicians, of all men, are most happy: whatever good success soever they have, the world proclaimeth and what faults they commit, the earth covereth.
Quarles—Hieroglyphics of the Life of Man.
Use three Physicians,
Still-first Dr. Quiet,
Next Dr. Merry-man
And Dr. Dyet.
From Regimen Sanitatis Salernitanum. Edition 1607.
By medicine life may be prolonged, yet death
Will seize the doctor too.
Cymbeline. Act V. Sc. 5. L. 29.
No cataplasm so rare,
Collected from all simples that have virtue
Under the moon, can save the thing from death.
Hamlet. Act IV. Sc. 7. L. 144.
In poison there is physic; and these news,
Having been well, that would have made me sick;
Being sick, have in some measure made me well.
Henry IV. Pt. II. Act I. Sc. 1. L. 137.
’Tis time to give ’em physic, their diseases
Are grown so catching.
Henry VIII. Act I. Sc. 3. L. 36.
In this point
All his tricks founder, and he brings his physic
After his patient’s death.
Henry VIII. Act III. Sc. 2. L. 39.
Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel.
King Lear. Act III. Sc. 4. L. 33.
How does your patient, doctor?
Not so sick, my lord,
As she is troubled with thick-coming fancies.
Macbeth. Act V. Sc. 3. L. 37.
Canst thou not minister to a mind diseas’d,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain,
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?
Therein the patient
Must minister to himself.
Throw physic to the dogs; I’ll none of it.
Macbeth. Act V. Sc. 3. L. 40.
If thou couldst, doctor, cast
The water of my land, find her disease,
And purge it to a sound and pristine health,
I would applaud thee to the very echo,
That should applaud again.
Macbeth. Act V. Sc. 3. L. 50.
In such a night
Medea gather’d the enchanted herbs
That did renew old Æson.
Merchant of Venice. Act V. Sc. 1. L. 12.
I do remember an apothecary,—
And hereabouts he dwells,—whom late I noted
In tatter’d weeds, with overwhelming brows,
Culling of simples; meagre were his looks,
Sharp misery had worn him to the bones:
And in his needy shop a tortoise hung,
An alligator stuff’d, and other skins
Of ill-shaped fishes; and about his shelves
A beggarly account of empty boxes,
Green earthen pots, bladders and musty seeds,
Remnants of packthread and old cakes of roses,
Were thinly scatter’d to make up a show.
Romeo and Juliet. Act V. Sc. 1. L. 37.
You rub the sore,
When you should bring the plaster.
Tempest. Act II. Sc. 1. L. 138.
Trust not the physician;
His antidotes are poison, and he slays
More than you rob.
Timon of Athens. Act IV. Sc. 3. L. 434.
When I was sick, you gave me bitter pills.
Two Gentlemen of Verona. Act II. Sc. 4. L. 149.
Crudelem medicum intemperans æger facit.
A disorderly patient makes the physician cruel.
Syrus—Maxims.
He (Tiberius) was wont to mock at the arts of physicians, and at those who, after thirty years of age, needed counsel as to what was good or bad for their bodies.
Tacitus—Annals. Bk. VI. Ch. XLVI. Same told by Suetonius—Life of Tiberius. Ch. LXVIII.
Ægrescitque medendo.
The medicine increases the disease.
Vergil—Æneid. XII. 46.
But nothing is more estimable than a physician who, having studied nature from his youth, knows the properties of the human body, the diseases which assail it, the remedies which will benefit it, exercises his art with caution, and pays equal attention to the rich and the poor.
Voltaire—A Philosophical Dictionary. Physicians.