Anna Quindlen Quotes

It's supposed to be a secret, but I'll tell you anyway. We doctors do nothing. We only help. And encourage the doctor within.

My job is writing. I get paid to do it. When was the last time you heard someone challenge a doctor for making money off of cancer?

I think we have to do everything that's useful. We're doctors. Our job is to tell the truth. And it doesn't have to be embellished in any way.

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

In the name of Hippocrates, doctors have invented the most exquisite form of torture ever known to man: survival.

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

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.

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

Whether it's possible or not, being a doctor, you take an oath. To care for your patient, not to kill them. You take an oath to do things that are proper in the medical world. Not to administer something outside of a hospital setting that's not even your area.

The growing professional disciplines of medical ethics and bioethics have had a profound impact on researchers, bedside doctors, associations of physicians, and government.

Medicine really matured me as a person because, as a physician, you're obviously dealing with life and death issues, issues much more serious than what we're talking about in entertainment. You can't get more serious than life and death. And if you can handle that, you can handle anything.

There are three subjects on which the knowledge of the medical profession in general is woefully weak; they are manners, morals, and medicine.

There is a pervasive lack of accountability in medicine that extends from the most newly qualified doctor right through the most senior professors.

… we are merely the servants of the public, in spite of our M.d. ’s and our hospital appointments

Doctors are kind of this shibboleth in our society. We know what they do, and we depend on them, but we don't know a lot about what it feels like from their side.

Teaching people to eat doesn't make a lot of money. Nevertheless, most of us go into medicine because of a genuine desire to help people and optimize their health.

The law and medicine should be very serious professions to undertake, should they not? People's lives and fortunes depend on them.

I find medicine is the best of all trades because whether you do any good or not you still. Get your money.

Let no one suppose that the words doctor and patient can disguise from the parties the fact that they are employer and employee.

I grew up with a real appreciation about just how wonderful and intimate the relationship is between a doctor and a patient was and the sense that this was a noble profession.

Bren MacGuff: Well, honey, doctors are sadists who like to play God and watch lesser people scream.

I think if I had done anything else I would like to have been a doctor. This is the sort of polar opposition to being a writer, I suppose.

The Doctor's Motto: Have patients.

What should be the glory of the profession is that a doctor should be able to meet his patients with no financial anxiety.