Medical Literature Quotes

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.

This is really the common mentality of prisoners: they read with great attention all the articles that deal with illnesses and send away for treatises and "be your own doctor" or "emergency treatments" and end up by discovering that they have at least 300 or 400 illnesses, whose symptoms they are experiencing.

Nothing in medical literature today communicates the idea that women's bodies are well-designed for birth. Ignorance of the capacities of women's bodies can flourish and quickly spread into the popular culture when the medical profession is unable to distinguish between ancient wisdom and superstitious belief.

The man who doctors himself with the aid of medical books, runs the risk of dying of a typographical error.

I read a lot of books for information, like doctor books, spy books. . . .

The literature of disease is more interesting to me than all the healthy books.

I normally hate books that have anything to do with medicine, thanks to my own background in nursing - FYI, almost everybody gets it wrong.

For the general practitioner a well-used library is one of the few correctives of the premature senility which is so apt to take him.