Medicine in quotations: views of health and disease through the ages

Abstract

The great fun of browsing through a book of quotations comes from recognizing one's own personal and cultural beliefs echoed, validated, and challenged in the familiar and not so familiar phrases of medicine's canon. At its best, such an anthology chronicles the profession's scientific advances, as it conveys the shifting cultural perspectives of the society it serves. Essentially, the sayings vibrantly give voice to the evolving practice, role, and philosophy of medicine as they simultaneously recount the successes, failures, and developments in both the healing profession and in humanity. Part social commentary, part scientific and historical record, such a compilation is both entertaining and educational and reaches a wide audience. The general reader, historian, or practitioner can quickly glimpse entries chronologically arranged under broad subject headings to discover what has changed and what remains the same about healing, and about us, from antiquity through the new millennium. Two distinguished medical historians, Edward Huth, M.D., editor emeritus of the Annals of Internal Medicine; and T. Jock Murray, M.D., professor of medical humanities and professor of medicine (neurology), Dalhousie University, have assembled the first major update of its kind in more than thirty years. Dr. Huth contributed to Familiar Medical Quotations, which is undoubtedly well known to many health sciences librarians. This latest collection should serve as a companion piece, because it includes the recent medical breakthroughs and the economic, social, and political changes that have occurred since the 1968 Strauss publication. The covered topics encompass such current issues and practices as: acupuncture, decision making, emotional growth, empathy, medical evidence, managed care, malpractice, peer review, mammography, needle aspiration, and molecular biology. Although the editors acknowledge a “slight bias” toward quotations pertaining to internal medicine and neurology (their chosen fields), they successfully manage to provide a wide range of views on a diverse array of topics that illustrate the “sometimes different thinking of different people in different times” (p. xii). This concept is well demonstrated throughout the text. It is particularly effective for subjects that many may consider solely contemporary, such as “malpractice” that, in fact, spans a list of authors and ideas from Matthew Prior, 1714, to Edward Shorter, 1991. The selection criteria used to determine the final 3,099 quotes from more than 5,000 possible entries include whether the quote is relevant to medical concepts and practice as well as to all human affairs; whether the quote has a clear and unmistakable meaning; whether the name of the author is easily recognized; and whether the quote would be regarded a concise and compelling truth even if taken out of context. The authors choose topic names that reflect everyday vocabulary whenever possible to facilitate access for all readers. The entries are grouped under broad subjects in chronological order from oldest to most recent with more specific subjects such as “physician as patient” cross-referenced in the subject index. Each entry contains the quotation's date, author, and source and is assigned an entry number for locating quotes from either the subject index or the author-citation index. The author-citation index provides the full bibliographic information for each original source. Finally, this book provides a superb and concise overview of the history of medicine through quotations. To be sure, there will be questions concerning the inclusion of some entries and authors and the exclusion of others. Indeed, it was remarkable to discover entries for the topic on grave robbing but to find no entries and no specific topic for gynecology. For that reason, the collection's value lies in its ability to show the reader how much and sometimes how little medicine and we have changed: “The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don't want, drink what you don't like, and do what you'd rather not.” Mark Twain, 1897 (p. 130)