Historical Medicine Quotes

Eighteenth-century doctors prescribed sugar pills for nearly everything: heart problems, headache, consumption, labor pains, insanity, old age, and blindness. Hence, the French expression 'like an apothecary without sugar' meant someone in an utterly hopeless situation.

A few hundred years ago there were no differences between magic and medicine.

In those days the best painkiller was ice; it wasn't addictive and it was particularly effective if you poured some whiskey over it.

One of my favorite footnotes in the hypochondria book [The Hypochondriac's Guide to Life. And Death.] was about the death of one of the King Charleses. He was essentially bled and vomited to death by his doctors. They also drilled holes in his head.

If you look over a list of medicinal recipes in vogue in the last century, how foolish and useless they are seen to be! And yet we use equally absurd ones with faith today.

Medicine rests upon four pillars - philosophy, astronomy, alchemy, and ethics.

Pain was something we were expected to endure. But I doubt very much if you would be entirely happy today if a doctor threw a towel in your face and jumped on you with a knife.

Since the most ancient times, all men, and particularly those who endeavored in the practice of medicine, have brought closer together two natural phenomena of capital importance: illness or fever and fermentation.

Before the 20th century, the ulcer was not a respectable disease. Doctors would say, 'You're under a lot of stress.' Nineteenth-century Europe and America had all these crazy health spas and quack treatments.

In the seventeenth century, the science of medicine had not wholly cut asunder from astrology and necromancy; and the trusting Christian still believed in some occult influences, chiefly planetary, which governed not only his crops but his health and life.

In 1880 at the Military Hospital at Constantine, I discovered, on the edges of the pigmented spherical bodies in the blood of a patient suffering from malaria, filiform elements resembling flagellae which were moving very rapidly, displacing the neighbouring red cells.

Deep down, I do not believe that there are any really good parents out there - the same way that I do not believe there were any really good doctors in the 10th century.