Hippocrates Quotes - Page 5

An insolent reply from a polite person is a bad sign.

Look to the seasons when choosing your cures

Idleness and lack of occupation tend - nay are dragged - towards evil.

Let your food be your medicine, and your medicine be your food.

There are, in effect, two things, to know and to believe one knows; to know is science; to believe one knows is ignorance.

The art has three factors, the disease, the patient, the physician. The physician is the servant of the art. The patient must cooperate with the physician in combatting the disease.

In all abundance there is lack.

In acute diseases the physician must conduct his inquiries in the following way. First he must examine the face of the patient, and see whether it is like the faces of healthy people, and especially whether it is like its usual self. Such likeness will be the best sign, and the greatest unlikeness will be the most dangerous sign. The latter will be as follows. Nose sharp, eyes hollow, temples sunken, ears cold and contracted with their lobes turned outwards, the skin about the face hard and tense and parched, the colour of the face as a whole being yellow or black.

It is believed by experienced doctors that the heat which oozes out of the hand, on being applied to the sick, is highly salutary. It has often appeared, while I have been soothing my patients, as if there was a singular property in my hands to pull and draw away from the affected parts aches and diverse impurities, by laying my hand upon the place, and extending my fingers toward it. Thus it is known to some of the learned that health may be implanted in the sick by certain gestures, and by contact, as some diseases may be communicated from one to another.

The physician must be able to tell the antecedents, know the present, and foretell the future — must mediate these things, and have two special objects in view with regard to disease, namely, to do good or to do no harm.

The chief virtue that language can have is clearness, and nothing detracts from it so much as the use of unfamiliar words.

Science begets knowledge; opinion, ignorance.

Eunuchs do not take the gout, nor become bald.

Of several remedies, the physician should choose the least sensational.

Medicine is of all the Arts the most noble; but, owing to the ignorance of those who practice it, and of those who, inconsiderately, form a judgment of them, it is at present behind all the arts.

About medications that are drunk or applied to wounds it is worth learning from everyone; for people do not discover these by reasoning but by chance, and experts not more than laymen.

Many admire, few know.

Where prayer, amulets and incantations work it is only a manifestation of the patient's belief.

Whoever is to acquire a competent knowledge of medicine, ought to be possessed of the following advantages: a natural disposition; instructionl a favorable place for the study; early tuition, love of labor; leisure.

Extreme remedies are very appropriate for extreme diseases.

The forms of diseases are many and the healing of them is manifold.

What medicines do not heal, the lance will; what the lance does not heal, fire will.

From nothing else but the brain come joys, delights, laughter and sports, and sorrows, griefs, despondency, and lamentations

War is the only proper school of the surgeon.

The life so short, the craft so long to learn.