Medical Perspective

Traditional medicine as we know it today is a relatively young form of man's attempt to treat human disease and illness. The American Medical Association, for instance, was founded in 1847. Parke-Davis Company founded the first pharmaceutical research laboratory 12 years later. While modern medicine has proven miraculous in many instances, we must remind ourselves of medical wisdom dating back as far as 2600 BC. Two thousand years before Hippocrates, the Egyptian Imhotep outlined the diagnosis and treatment of 200 diseases. He was among the first to document the extraction of medicines from plants.

The following quotations provide perspective easily lost in our contemporary medical world.

The greatest mistake in the treatment of diseases is that there are physicians for the body and physicians for the soul, although the two cannot be separated. ~Plato

There is no curing a sick man who believes himself to be in health. ~Henri Amiel

It is sometimes as dangerous to be run into by a microbe as by a trolley car. ~J.J. Walsh

Symptoms, then, are in reality nothing but the cry from suffering organs. ~Jean Martin Charcot, translated from French

A physician is obligated to consider more than a diseased organ, more even than the whole man - he must view the man in his world. ~Harvey Cushing

As it takes two to make a quarrel, so it takes two to make a disease, the microbe and its host. ~Charles V. Chapin

The road to medical knowledge is through the pathological museum and not through an apothecary's shop. ~William Withey Gull

The doctor of the future will give no medicine but will interest his patients in the care of the human frame, in diet and in the cause and prevention of disease. ~Thomas Edison

Man is a creature composed of countless millions of cells: a microbe is composed of only one, yet throughout the ages the two have been in ceaseless conflict. ~A.B. Christie

The Lord hath created medicines out of the earth; and he that is wise will not abhor them. ~Ecclesiasticus 38:4