Robert Jay Lifton Quotes

I think we learn from medicine everywhere that it is, at its heart, a human endeavor, requiring good science but also a limitless curiosity and interest in your fellow human being, and that the physician-patient relationship is key; all else follows from it.

A doctor is not a mechanic. A car doesn't react with a mechanic, but a human being does.

Practicing medicine is not only my vocation, it gives me an opportunity to continue to be in direct contact with people, to see them and hear their needs.

Doctors, dressed up in one professional costume or another, have been in busy practice since the earliest records of every culture on earth. It is hard to think of a more dependable or enduring occupation, harder still to imagine any future events leading to its extinction.

As a doctor, I've learned the importance and value of listening.

The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.

Medicine involves dealing with people who are going through changes and cycles, often people trapped in bodies that are going out from under them. Spending time with them lets you think their way, gives you insights as a writer.

Diagnosis is not the end, but the beginning of practice.

Originally, I was in high school, and I was studying biology, and I got really interested in the field of medicine. And then, I got a lot of early exposure to it because my father's a physician, and I saw the relationship that he had with his patients, and it was something that drew my attention to how wonderful the field was.

He who studies medicine without books sails an uncharted sea, but he who studies medicine without patients does not go to sea at all.

The practice of medicine is a thinker's art the practice of surgery a plumber's.

I treated as few patients as I could as a medical student, and I never practiced medicine.

If I hadn't become a photographer, I would have loved to become a doctor. I would have loved to have done something that actually helped people and changed their lives.

To study the phenomena of disease without books is to sail an uncharted sea, while to study books without patients is not to go to sea at all.

I'm a physician first and foremost. I will always be a physician.

Medicine is not only a science; it is also an art. It does not consist of compounding pills and plasters; it deals with the very processes of life, which must be understood before they may be guided.

Hospitals are about healing.

What doctor does not need platform heels and dark black eyeliner to treat their patients?

For as long as I can really remember, I wanted to be a doctor.

Medicine grounds me, it centers me, that's why I continue to do it.

Medicine has always been my calling.

I suppose one has a greater sense of intellectual degradation after an interview with a doctor than from any human experience.

I had learned of Gertrude Stein's bon mot that medicine opened all doors. This prompted me, in different moods, to view my future life as literary psychiatrist, globe-trotting tropical disease specialist, or academic internist.

For a long time, I thought I would like to be a doctor. Such a good profession. So explicitly good. Never a waste of time.

Expertise is the mantra of modern medicine.