God and the Doctor we alike adore / But only when in danger, not before; / The danger o’er, both are alike requited, / God is forgotten, and the Doctor slighted.
I have had too much experience of life to believe in the infallibility of doctors. Some of them are clever men and some of them are not, and half the time the best of them don’t know what is the matter with you.
When the pain is great enough, we will let anyone be doctor.
Medicine has succeeded because of its ability to fix. If your problem is fixable, we know just what to do. But if it’s not? The fact that we have had no adequate answers to this question is troubling.
Few people outside medicine realize that what tortures doctors most is uncertainty, rather than the fact they often deal with people who are suffering or who are about to die. It is easy enough to let somebody die if one knows beyond doubt that they cannot be saved—if one is a decent doctor, one will be sympathetic, but the situation is clear. This is life, and we all have to die sooner or later. It is when I do not know for certain whether I can help or not, or should help or not, that things become so difficult.
Mrs. Mease told me when dying that among other sins she had to repent of, one was too much confidence in my remedies.
I don’t really believe in medical miracles. People should give themselves more credit for their healing abilities. A doctor participates in the process, that’s all. One of the best things a doctor can do is encourage a tough, fighting spirit and a sense of humor. Those people almost always do better than the others.
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.
Petunia only ever went to the doctor reluctantly, and her motive in doing so was always the same: She did it in order to feel less anxious about things. The doctor was supposed to make the worry go away; she did quite enough worrying without actually having something to worry about.
My doctor is wonderful. . . . When I couldn’t afford an operation, he touched up the X-rays.
All good doctors must be primarily enthusiasts. They must have, like writers and painters, and priests, a sense of vocation—a deep-rooted, unsentimental desire to do good.
“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.”
You are a physician, doctor. You would promise life to a corpse if he could swallow pills.
Part of what a doctor can give a patient is consolation and reassurance. This is not to be dismissed out of hand. My doctor doesn’t literally practice faith-healing by laying on of hands. But many’s the time I’ve been instantly “cured” of some minor ailment by a reassuring voice from an intelligent face surmounting a stethoscope.
I often think that we family doctors are like priests. People tell us their secrets, because they know we won’t judge them. They know we’re used to looking at human beings as it were without their skins.
He had surrendered all reality, all dread and fear, to the doctor beside him, as people do.
He cures most in whom most have faith.
