Medical History Quotes

In the early 1700's, two physicians...learned about pinkroot's efficacy from the Indians. The word soon spread to the general public, who praised this worm treatment, particularly against roundworms, for the next 200 years. Pinkroot fell into disuse in the early 1900's, simply because greedy herb dealers adulterated or even substituted shipments of true pinkroot with quantities of other plants.

When I was a medical student in the 1950s, we practically never spoke about Alzheimer's disease. And why is that so? And that is because people didn't live long enough to have Alzheimer's disease.

We doctors have always been a simple trusting folk. Did we not believe Galen implicitly for 1500 years and Hippocrates for more than 2000?

Masters of Sex is the degree I got from Boston College.

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.

The fallacy of genetic determinism is to suppose that the genes "make' the organism. It is a basic principle of developmental biology that organisms undergo a continuous development from conception to death, a development that is the unique consequence of the interaction of the genes in their cells, the temporal sequence of environments through which the organisms pass, and random cellular processes that determine the life, death, and transformation of cells. As a result, even the fingerprints of identical twins are not identical. Their temperaments, mental processes, abilities, life choices, disease histories, and death certainly differ despite the determined efforts of many parents to enforce as great a similarity as possible.

My father was a research doctor at the National Institutes of Health in the early 1980s, and you couldn't work in the field and not know about D. Carleton Gajdusek, who my father often mentioned.

If you have been vaccinated for polio, mumps, measles, chicken pox, hepatitis, or rabies, it may be too late for you to stand your ethical ground: You have already benefited from fetal-tissue research. This is, after all, a practice that's been legal since the 1930s.

There's no reason that patients can't have electronic access to their complete medical history... Just as people can check their bank account information online or using their ATM card, patients who want to should have electronic access to their medical records.

The history of using mice to stand in for humans in medical experiments is replete with failures.

My mother was a nurse, and in her era, most diseases weren't understood; people put mustard plasters on knees and rubbed camphor on your chest if you had a cough and did funny things to you if you had tuberculosis - all these things that really made very little difference once proper treatments were brought in.

The homeless often lose trust in people: in the hospital doctors, who had no choice but to discharge them back on to the streets, and in the family members from whom they have become estranged. Their past use of the NHS can make it difficult to patch together a full medical history.

I've had, like, 10 surgeries in my life: four or so on my knee, my hip and my nose a couple of times.

Oliver Sacks remains my hero to this day. He was one of the first medical writers I read. The other was Lewis Thomas, who is no longer alive but is just heroic to me.

My own medical history during my hospital stay was readily available to me through literally thousands of pages of medical records that outlined everything from my 'bowel releasing' schedule to the minute details of my brain biopsy procedure.

There's not an emperor or artist out there I won't read a medical history of, even if - or especially if - the author uses that medical history to spin out wild counterfactuals about how wars or masterpieces might have turned out differently. They're like delicious philosophical mints to roll around inside your mouth, just to see how they taste.

Completeness? Happiness? These words don't come close to describing my emotions. There truly is nothing I can say to capture what motherhood means to me, particularly given my medical history.

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

Being prepared helps you feel more confident at the doctor's office. Think about what you want to ask and write those questions down.

It was my Uncle George who discovered that alcohol was a food well in advance of modern medical thought.

"Dr. Munro, sir," said he, "I am a walking museum. You could fit what ISN'T the matter with me on to the back of a -- visiting card. If there's any complaint you want to make a special study of, just you come to me, sir, and see what I can do for you. It's not every one that can say that he has had cholera three times, and cured himself by living on red pepper and brandy."

My mom was a diabetic. Her sister was a diabetic, so I was already a candidate.

Many years ago doctors would bleed sick patients with leeches. Today, the insurance companies do that.

I had to take a physical to do this show. They had a lot of weird questions like, "Have you ever tried sugar or PCP?"

The pulse of the People is still so high as to call for more bleeding, before quinine can be administered with any hope of benefit.