Men worry over the great number of diseases, while doctors worry over the scarcity of effective remedies.
Pien Ch'iao (fl. B.C. 255)

Some remedies are worse than the disease.
Publilius Syrus (fl. B.C. 42)

Prevention is better than cure.
Erasmus (1466-1536)

Medicine is not only a science; it is also an art. It does not consist of compounding pills and plasters; it deals with the very processes of life, which must be understood before they may be guided.
Paracelsus (1493-1541)

Once a disease has entered the body, all parts which are healthy must fight it: not one alone, but all. Because a disease might mean their common death. Nature knows this; and Nature attacks the disease with whatever help she can muster.
Paracelsus (1493-1541)

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.
Bacon (1561-1626)

By medicine life may be prolonged, yet death will seize the doctor too.
Shakespeare (1564-1616)

He who cures a disease may be the skillfullest, but he that prevents it is the safest physician.
Thomas Fuller (1608-1661)

As long as men are liable to die and are desirous to live, a physician will be made fun of, but he will be well paid.
La Bruyere (1645-1696)

Doctors prescribe medicine of which they know little, to cure diseases of which they know less, in human beings of which they know nothing.
Voltaire (1694-1778)

I know of nothing more laughable than a doctor who does not die of old age.
Voltaire (1694-1778)

The art of medicine consists of amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.
Voltaire (1694-1778)

He's the best physician that knows the worthlessness of the most medicines.
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)

Disease is the retribution of outraged Nature.
Hosea Ballou (1771-1852)

It is with disease of the mind, as with those of the body; we are half dead before we understand our disorder, and half cured when we do.
Colton (1780-1832)

A bodily disease which we look upon as whole and entire within itself, may, after all, be but a symptom of some ailment in the spiritual part.
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)

To array a man's will against his sickness is the supreme art of medicine.
Beecher (1813-1878)

Physician - One upon whom we set our hopes when ill and our dogs when well.
Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)

Medicine is a science of uncertainty and an art of probability.
William Osler (1849-1919)

Variability is the law of life, and as no two faces are the same, so no two bodies are alike, and no two individuals react alike and behave alike under the abnormal conditions which we know as disease.
William Osler (1849-1919)

The modern sympathy with invalids is morbid. Illness of any kind is hardly a thing to be encouraged in others.
Oscar Wilde (1856-1900)

The majority of the diseases which the human family have been and still are suffering under, they have created by ignorance of their own organic health, and work perseveringly to tear themselves to pieces, and when broken down and debilitated in body and mind, send for the doctor and drug themselves to death.
Ellen White, co-founder Seventh Day Adventists, 1866

Happiness? That's nothing more than good health and a poor memory.
Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965)

Nine-tenths of our sickness can be prevented by right thinking plus right hygiene - nine-tenths of it!
Henry Miller (1891-1980)

Barn-yard medicine has not given us any vaccination procedure that really protects against illness, but many that endanger the body, that even bring death.
Dr. med. Guttman, extract from Biologische Heilkunst, 1932/10

The prerequisite for today's medical policy is naturally the currently predominant system of medicine. The sick are the source of income, therefore it is necessary for sick people to be there, yes, it proves advantageous if one makes the people artificially sick.
Dr. med. Steintl: 'International Medical Policy', 1938, Berlin

Since the regimentation of Medicine by quacks and medical gangsters in control of the American Medical Association, this organization has become one of the most vicious rackets in the country.
Dr. Charles Lyman Loffler, as cited by Morris Bealle in The Drug Story, 1949

When oestrogen first became available for clinical use, there was an understandable over-enthusiasm for its application... If one depends on the beautifully embossed brochures which exhort the practitioner with every mail one falls, unhappily, into the security of the illusion that there are neither contra-indications nor side-effects in the use of estrogen.
Drs. Robert A. Kimbrough and S. Lion Israel, Journal of the American Medical Association, Vol. 138, December 25, 1949, p.1216

Vaccination also causes leukemia to break out.
Dr. B. Duperrat, of the Saint-Louis Hospital in Paris, French medical journal Presse Medicale, March 12, 1955

Research is subordinated (not to a long-term social benefit) but to an immediate commercial profit. Currently, disease (not health) is one of the major sources of profit for the pharmaceutical industry, and the doctors are willing agents of those profits.
Dr. Pierre Bosquet , Nouvelle Critique, France, May 1961

When will they realize that there are too many drugs? No fewer than 150,000 preparations are now in use. About 15,000 new mixtures and dosages hit the market each year, while about 12,000 die off...We simply don't have enough diseases to go around. At the moment the most helpful contribution is the new drug to counteract the untoward effect of other new drugs.
Dr. Walter Modell of Cornell University Medical College, Time, May 26, 1961

Today's medicine is at the end of its road. It can no longer be transformed, modified, readjusted. That's been tried too often. Today's medicine must DIE in order to be reborn. We must prepare its complete renovation.
French physician, Prof. Maurice Delort, inaugural session of the Academy de Bourges, December 16, 1962

After a 20-year study, Dr. Kempe [Dr. Charles Henry Kempe, University of Colorado] recommends abolishing smallpox vaccination. Since 1948 there have been no deaths from smallpox in the United States. In the same period more than 300 persons have died from smallpox vaccinations, including vaccine-induced encephalitis.
The Evening Bulletin, Philidelphia, May 7, 1965

... 61 percent of all deformities in new-born infants and 88 percent of all stillbirths must be attributed to the effects of medicaments.
Dr. W. Chr. Mueller of the 1st University Hospital for Women, Munich. In the German medical journal Muenchener Medizinische Wochenschrift, No.34, 1969

Thalidomide is not the first nor the last drug to have brought heartbreak where it was meant to bring help. There have been quite a number of other tragedies since Thalidomide went wrong 13 years ago.
An editorial in The Economist, London, January 6, 1973

Millions of people have been vaccinated with the polio vaccine, which contains the cancer-forming SV-40 virus originally found in monkeys. It is possible that it will take 20 years or still longer before the possible damaging effects of this virus come to light.
Professor J. Clausen of the Institute of Preventive Medicine at the University of Odense, March 1973

Every month, millions are in fact being damaged by treatment which is supposed to be helping them.
Dr. Werner Lehmpfuhl, general practitioner in Hanover, in the weekly magazine Welt am Sonntag, July 29, 1973

Modern medicine is a negation of health. It isn't organized to serve human health, but only itself, as an institution. It makes more people sick than it heals.
Ivan Illich (medical historian), on Swiss television, Lugano, 1975.

The medical establishment has become the major threat to health.
Ivan Illich, in Limits to Medicine, 1976

A new U.S. study challenges claims made for the last 35 years that women can prevent breast cancer by regularly taking estrogen pills.... the report seems to indicate the drug actually may cause the disease.... Physicians have been prescribing estrogen for an estimated 5 million to 6 million middle-aged women in the United States alone.
International Herald Tribune, August 17, 1976

The oil lobby, perhaps the most powerful lobby on earth, is almost matched by hospital owners and doctors.
- President Carter, June 8, 1979

The public is surely entitled to convincing proof, beyond all reasonable doubt, that artificial immunization is in fact a safe and effective procedure, in no way injurious to health, and that the threat of the corresponding natural diseases remain sufficiently clear and urgent to warrant mass inoculation of everyone, even against their will if necessary. Unfortunately, such proof has never been given.
Richard Moskowitz, M.D., Journal of the American Institute of Homeopathy, March 1983 (76:7)

Between 1962 and 1982, the numbers of people who contracted or died of cancer both increased. Cancer deaths rose 8.7%... The bottom line is that despite all the billions of dollars, and the promises and the claims of success, more people are dying of cancer than ever before...
Dr. John C. Bailer III, biostatistician, Harvard University School of Public Health. Co-author of Report on Cancer in the New England Journal of Medicine, May 1986.

Everyone should know that most cancer research is largely a fraud, and that the major cancer research organisations are derelict in their duties to the people who support them.
Linus Pauling, Ph.D., two time Nobel Prize winner, in Outrage, Oct/Nov 1986

...the simple unadulterated truth is that they are neither winning the fight against cancer nor are they about to find a cure. They have been claiming that a cure is just around the corner for a good 50 years or more, but the sad fact remains that in spite of the countless millions being collected, cancer in its most serious forms - in the lung, breast and bowel - is no nearer to being beaten today than it was at the turn of the century. Indeed, in some cases - breast cancer for example - the exact opposite is true; the scientists are actually losing the fight.
Cancer Control Society, Great Britain, in Outrage (magazine), Oct/Nov 1986

Economics and politics simply intertwine in shaping conventional medicine's approach to cancer. Very simply put, treating disease is enormously profitable, preventing disease is not.
The British Cancer Control Society, Outrage, Oct/Nov 1986

Vaccines are made from: mucus of infected children (whooping cough), excrement from typhoid victims (typhoid), fermented chick embryos, and until recently vaccines for polio were got from the diseased kidneys of monkeys, and cause: leukemia, encephalitis, Multiple Sclerosis - and: "Now I believe the smallpox-vaccine theory is the explanation to the explosion of AIDS".
World Health Organization, advisor, Times 11.5.87

Vaccination is not necessary, not useful, does not protect. There are twice as many casualties from vaccination as from AIDS.
Dr. med. Gerhard Buchwald, West Germany, specialist of internal diseases and participant in about 150 trials of vaccination victims. April 1988.

The use of Accutane, a Hoffman-LaRoche product, has caused hundreds of defective births. The packages containing this drug will henceforth have to display the picture of a malformed newborn.
Swiss State News on TV on May 30, 1988

Chemotherapy and radiotherapy will make the ancient method of drilling holes in a patient's head to permit the escape of demons look relatively advanced.... Toxic chemotherapy is a hoax. The doctors who use it are guilty of pre-meditated murder, and the use of cobalt and other methods of cancer treatment popular today effectively closes the door on cure.
Ernst T. Krebs, Jr., a prominent biochemist from San Francisco, co-discoverer of vitamin B-17 (commonly called 'Laetril' ), and discoverer of vitamin B-15 (pangamic acid), speaking before a seminar in Newark, New Jersey, in 1988

Before thirty, men seek disease; after thirty, disease seeks men.
Chinese Proverb

The superior doctor prevents sickness;
The mediocre doctor attends to impending sickness;
The inferior doctor treats actual sickness;
Chinese Proverb