Clinical Practice Quotes

I am a career physician. I practiced for 32 years before I began my career as a public servant.

To those who have chosen the profession of medicine, a knowledge of chemistry, and of some branches of natural history, and, indeed, of several other departments of science, affords useful assistance.

I always wanted to be a medical doctor, and I never thought of business.

That made me think I could contribute more to society by looking at people on the autopsy table and feeding back the findings so that lots of people could benefit, rather than just treating patients one at a time.

I liked medicine. I liked helping people. I liked the biology of it and understanding how the body works.

I have a Bachelor in medicine, a Bachelor in surgery, and I am a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons.

In 1968, I left Cambridge and went to work in New York with Irving M. London, who was then the chairman of the Department of Medicine at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

We now live in the era of the super-specialist - of clinicians who have taken the time to practice at one narrow thing until they can do it better than anyone who hasn't.

Originally, I was in high school, and I was studying biology, and I got really interested in the field of medicine. And then, I got a lot of early exposure to it because my father's a physician, and I saw the relationship that he had with his patients, and it was something that drew my attention to how wonderful the field was.

I want to do something in medicine, for sure. I don't know what, exactly, that entails, but something along those lines.

In medical school, it's quite possible to get taught that you can diagnose everybody and treat everything. But then you get out in the real world and find that for most patients walking through your door, you have no idea what's causing their symptoms.

I observe the physician with the same diligence as the disease.

I went to college, I went pre-med, I thought I was going to be a doctor.

I had learned of Gertrude Stein's bon mot that medicine opened all doors. This prompted me, in different moods, to view my future life as literary psychiatrist, globe-trotting tropical disease specialist, or academic internist.

I wanted to be a doctor, because I grew up on 'Cosby.'

One fateful morning, I looked at myself in the mirror and realized that I shouldn't be operating on patients and then teaching them to eat to avoid me in the future; I should teach them to eat so that I wouldn't have to operate on them in the first place!

The medical profession is - and knows itself to be - endemically conservative and conformist.

I began the study of medicine, impelled by a desire for knowledge of facts and of man. The resolution to do disciplined work tied me to both laboratory and clinic for a long time to come.

You can't be a doctor if you don't know the entire parts of the body.

By keeping my hand in that, it's the way I keep learning. The main way you learn in medicine is by practicing and working with patients.

Experience stands on its own dunghill in medicine, and reason yields it place. Medicine has always professed experience to be the touchstone of its operations.

Medicine, likewise, because it deals with things, has always been for our serener circles a Cinderella, blooming maid as happily as she has grown nevertheless.

There are only two sorts of doctors; those who practise with their brains, and those who practise with their tongues.

For too long nurses have been undervalued, restricted in what they could do, with too few career opportunities in clinical practice. For far too long, nurses have endured a pay system that has held them back - both professionally as well as financially.

Sometime they don't let you know that they know that they don't know everything, but the core of the medical approach is that you try to identify pathologies, which are subsystems within the human body or the larger system that are having undesirable consequences.