C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Medicine
I firmly believe that if the whole materia medica could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be all the better for mankind and all the worse for the fishes.
The poets did well to conjoin music and medicine, because the office of medicine is but to tune the curious harp of man’s body.
The medicine increases the disease.
Learn from the beasts the physic of the field.
Time is generally the best doctor.
Some remedies are worse than the disease.
Extreme remedies are very appropriate for extreme diseases.
Physicians, of all men, are most happy; whatever good success soever they have, the world proclaimeth; and what faults they commit, the earth covereth.
The disease and its medicine are like two factions in a besieged town; they tear one another to pieces, but both unite against their common enemy, nature.
But nothing is more estimable than a physician who, having studied nature from his youth, knows the properties of the human body, the diseases which assail it, the remedies which will benefit it, exercises his art with caution, and pays equal attention to the rich and the poor.