Medicine Quotes by Lewis Thomas

8 Medicine quotes by Lewis Thomas

Lewis Thomas’s eight remarks on medicine distill his curiosity and wit. Though brief, they provide a clear sense of his reverence for the complexities of health and science.

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It is when physicians are bogged down by their incomplete technologies, by the innumerable things they are obliged to do in medicine…

Lewis Thomas

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I cannot think of a single field in biology or medicine in which we can claim genuine understanding, and it seems to…

Lewis Thomas

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The dilemma of modern medicine, and the underlying central flaw in medical education and, most of all, in the training of interns,…

Lewis Thomas

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My father was a doctor, and I admired him and got along well with him. He took me with him on house…

Lewis Thomas

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Good applied science in medicine, as in physics, requires a high degree of certainty about the basic facts at hand, and especially…

Lewis Thomas

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Medical knowledge and technical savvy are biodegradable. The sort of medicine that was practiced in Boston or New York or Atlanta fifty…

Lewis Thomas

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Doctors, dressed up in one professional costume or another, have been in busy practice since the earliest records of every culture on…

Lewis Thomas

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The great secret of doctors, known only to their wives, but still hidden from the public, is that most things get better…

Lewis Thomas

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More by Lewis Thomas

“We are endowed with genes which code out our reaction to beavers and otters, maybe our reaction to each other as well. We are…

Lewis Thomas

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We are a spectacular, splendid manifestation of life. We have language. . . . We have affection. We have genes for usefulness, and usefulness…

Lewis Thomas

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“It is not a simple thing to decide where we fit, for at one time or another in our lives we manage to organize…

Lewis Thomas

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It is in our genes to understand the universe if we can, to keep trying even if we cannot, and to be enchanted by…

Lewis Thomas

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If an idea cannot move on its own, pushing it doesn't help; best to let it lie there.

Lewis Thomas

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Left to ourselves, mechanistic and autonomic, we hanker for friends.

Lewis Thomas

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I do not agree with this century's fashion of running down the human species as a failed try, a doomed sport. At our worst,…

Lewis Thomas

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It would seem to me... an offense against nature, for us to come on the same scene endowed as we are with the curiosity,…

Lewis Thomas

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The drive to be useful is encoded in our genes. But when we gather in very large numbers, as in the modern nation-state, we…

Lewis Thomas

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I would send the complete works of Johann Sebastian Bach into outer space on the Voyager spacecraft. But that would be boasting.

Lewis Thomas

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“Nature abhors a long silence.”

Lewis Thomas

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“The future is too interesting and dangerous to be entrusted to any predictable, reliable agency. We need all the fallibility we can get. Most…

Lewis Thomas

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We pass the word around; we ponder how the case is put by different people, we read the poetry; we meditate over the literature;…

Lewis Thomas

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“The uniformity of the earth's life, more astonishing than its diversity, is accountable by the high probability that we derived, originally, from some single…

Lewis Thomas

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Having long suspected that there was something alive in there, running the place, separate from everything else, absolutely individual and independent, we've celebrated by…

Lewis Thomas

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