Doctors and Psychologists

It seems a commonly received idea among men and even among women themselves that it requires nothing but a disappointment in love, the want of an object, a general disgust, or incapacity for other things, to turn a woman into a good nurse. This reminds one of the parish where a stupid old man was set to be schoolmaster because he was ‘past keeping the pigs’.
Florence Nightingale

If they do no other good they do at least this, that they prepare their patients early for death, undermining little by little and cutting off their enjoyment of life.
Michel de Montaigne on physicans who prescribe diets

The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.
Voltaire

Throw physic to the dogs; I’ll none of it.
William Shakespeare, Macbeth

I find medicine is the best of all trades because whether you do any good or not you still get your money.
Molière

When a lot of remedies are suggested for a disease, that means it cannot be cured.
Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard

Despite all our toils and progress, the art of medicine still falls somewhere between trout casting and spook writing.
Ben Hecht

Nobody can read Freud without realizing he was the scientific equivalent of another nuisance, George Bernard Shaw.
Robert M. Hutchins on Sigmund Freud

Anyone who pays to see a psychiatrist needs their head looking at.
Woody Allen

A psychiatrist is a fellow who asks you a lot of expensive questions your wife asks for nothing.
Joey Adams

Instead of wishing to see more doctors made by women joining what there are, I wish to see as few doctors, male or female, as possible. For, mark you, the women have made no improvement – they have only tried to be men and they have only succeeded in being third-rate men.
Florence Nightingale

If the human brain were simple enough to understand we’d be too simple to understand it.
Emerson Pugh

I’ve frequently observed that people who believe in a sixth sense are usually deficient in the other five.
Victor Lewis-Smith

A successful parent is one who raises a child who grows up and is able to pay for his or her own psychoanalysis.
Nora Ephron

He was meddling too much in my private life.
Tennessee Williams on why he had given up visiting his psychoanalyst

Actually I loathed the Viennese quack.
Vladimir Nabokov on Sigmund Freud

I’m a fucking doctor.
R.D. Laing’s last reported words after suffering a heart attack in public. As people gathered round the spot someone said ‘Get a doctor.’