Samuel Johnson Quotes

Many medical students, like most American patients, confuse science and technology. They think that what it means to be a scientific doctor is to bring to bear the maximum amount of technology on any given patient. And this makes them dangerous.

There's a classic medical aphorism: 'Listen to the patient; they're telling you the diagnosis.' Actually, a lot of patients are just telling you a lot of rubbish, and you have to stop them and ask the pertinent questions. But, yes, in both drama and medicine, isolated facts can accumulate to create the narrative.

Doctors most commonly get mixed up between absence of evidence and evidence of abense

The physician cannot prescribe by letter, he must feel the pulse.

There is no more dangerous error than that of mistaking the effect for the cause.

If you carry a leaky water bag, you will get your back wet.

People think you go to doctors for their knowledge. You don't go to doctors for their knowledge. You go to doctors for their judgment, their instinct, what to do, how to make the right call.

It's been reported a lot that I've had two bouts of mononucleosis. The evidence suggests it wasn't two bouts, it was the same bout. I never got over it the first time. That's hard to explain to people. It makes it look like I'm not very resilient, whereas it was completely mismanaged.

I'm trying to become just more clinical in every situation, whether it's the final pass, the final shot, or whatever it is.

As a medical student in the 1970s, I was taught that the foundations of diagnosis and treatment were to take a detailed history and to perform a comprehensive clinical examination.

The big mystery of Big Data is causation versus correlation.

It's in poor taste to question anyone's illness diagnosed through specific testing by their doctor.

Doctors are just people and they can make mistakes.

You cannot look at someone and say they are unhealthy. You are not a doctor, and if you were, you'd realize why that's silly.

One of the most widespread diseases is diagnosis.

Fundamentalists who say they are not going to pay any attention to the charts are like a doctor who says he's not going to take a patient's temperature.

Few diseases present greater difficulties in the way of diagnosis than malignant endocarditis, difficulties which in many cases are practi- cally insurmountable. It is no disparagement to the many skilled physicians who have put their cases upon record to say that, in fully one-half the diagnosis was made post mortem.

It is a category mistake to ask, 'Who made the Unmade?' or 'Who created the Uncreated?' One may as well ask, 'Where is the bachelor's wife?'

No mistake is so commonly made by clever people as that of assuming a cause to be bad because the arguments of its supporters are, to a great extent, nonsensical

Physicians, when the cause of disease is discovered, consider that the cure is discovered.

The dogma is that that dogma is a mistake.

It would be a mistake, though, to consider care by family doctors or midwives inferior to that offered by obstetricians simply on the grounds that obstetricians need not refer care to a family physician or midwife if no complications develop during a course of labor.

But to measure cause and effect... you must ensure that a simple correlation, however tempting it may be, is not mistaken for a cause. In the 1990s the stork population of Germany increased and the German at-home birth rate rose as well. Shall we credit storks for airlifting the babies?

I told my doctor I think my wife has VD. He gave himself a shot of penicillin.

There is no greater mistake in the world than the looking upon every sort of nonsense as want of sense.