Top 183 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Surgeons

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite impressions.

The truly scientific mind is altogether unafraid of the new, and while having no mercy for ideas which have served their turn or shown their uselessness, it will not grudge to any unfamiliar conception its moment of full and friendly attention, hoping to expand rather than to minimize what small core of usefulness it may happen to contain.

One of the things I say is I don't think any of us should be average. Everybody's got a gift. The chance of finding your gift and then sharing it. There's just no room in this world to be average, you need to be the best you can be.

A successful surgeon should be a man who, when asked to name the three best surgeons in the world, would have difficulty deciding on the other two.

I have to display what I have seen to people.

It is the surgeon’s duty to tranquillize the temper, to beget cheerfulness, and to impart confidence of recovery.

The natural history of science is the study of the unknown. If you fear it you're not going to study it and you're not going to make any progress.

You must come to terms with the reality that nothing outside ourselves, be it people or things is actually responsible for our happiness.

Some people think plant-based diet, whole foods diet is extreme. Half a million people a year will have their chests opened up and a vein taken from their leg and sewn onto their coronary artery. Some people would call that extreme.

I have a conviction that it's only when you are put at full stretch that you can realise your full potential.

Medical scientists are nice people, but you should not let them treat you.

Statistics are like women; mirrors of purest virtue and truth, or like whores to use as one pleases.

If you don't fall down, you aren't trying hard enough.

How good it is to be well-fed, healthy, and kind all at the same time.

Nothing in this world is so good as usefulness. It binds your fellow-creatures to you, and you to them; it tends to the improvement of your own character; and it gives you a real importance in society, much beyond what any artificial station can bestow.

The horrors of Vivisection have supplanted the solemnity, the thrilling fascination, of the old unetherized operation upon the human sufferer. Their recorded phenomena, stored away by the physiological inquisitor on dusty shelves, are mostly of as little present use to man as the knowledge of a new comet or of a tungstate of zirconium ... -contemptibly small compared with the price paid for it in agony and torture.

The brain is an island in an osmotically homogeneous sea.

There is a magic power in your own hands. Take your vital decisions-they may be grave and momentous and far-reaching in their consequences. Think a hundred times before you take any decision, but once a decision is taken, stand by it as one man.

What mankind can dream research and technology can achieve

Take care of yourself mentally, physically, and spiritually so that you can take care of the world.

I consider the differences between man and animals in propensities, feelings, and intellectual faculties, to be the result of the same cause as that which we assign for the variations in other functions, viz. difference of organization; and that the superiority of man in rational endowments is not greater than the more exquisite, complicated, and perfectly developed structure of his brain, and particularly of his ample cerebral hemispheres, to which the rest of the animal kingdom offers no parallel, nor even any near approximation, is sufficient to account for.

You hold your future in your own hands. Never waver in this belief.

Every surgeon carries within himself a small cemetery, where from time to time he goes to pray.

Serendipity is looking in a haystack for a needle and discovering a farmer's daughter.

There cannot always be fresh fields of conquest by the knife; there must be portions of the human frame that will ever remain sacred from its intrusions, at least in the surgeon's hands. That we have already, if not quite, reached these final limits, there can be little question. The abdomen, the chest, and the brain will be forever shut from the intrusion of the wise and humane surgeon.

The only weapon with which the unconscious patient can immediately retaliate upon the incompetent surgeon is hemorrhage.

Whatever you give, if you give it freely and without conditions it'll come back to you two fold.

You need the courage to seem foolish and to fail.

I make jokes about the fact that as a neuro-surgeon I shouldn't be required at a motor race because the drivers don't have any brains.... otherwise they wouldn't race.

It is the doctors who desert the dying and there is so much to be learned about pain.

The UFO was bouncing around the 747. It was a huge ball with lights running around it... Well, I've been involved in a lot of cover-ups with the FAA. When we gave the presentation to the Reagan staff, they had all those people swear that this never happened. But they never had me swear it never happened. I can tell you what I've seen with my own eyes. I've got a videotape. I've got the voice tape. I've got the reports that were filed that will confirm what I've been telling you.

Experience comprises illusions lost, rather than wisdom gained.

People tend to box little girls in. They teach them to sit properly and stand quietly and not attract attention. Sports is one place where girls can be free and enjoy the exhilaration of movement.

Get a scalpel, and practice just, say, cutting a piece of meat or something like that. You sort of learn how you want to hold your fingers, and that sort of thing, and try to become graceful when you operate.

What is love? two souls and one flesh; friendship? two bodies and one soul.

Don't sugar-coat results. Don't make yourself look good when your strategy fails. Don't make others look good if their strategy failed.

Success causes us to be more praised than known.

The moral is obvious it is that great armaments lead inevitably to war.

Conscientious men are, almost everywhere, less encouraged than tolerated.

If all your peers understand what you've done, it's not creative.

I think human beings have an innate desire to help each other. And whether you're in medicine or anything else, if you see someone that you can help...you get a gratification from doing it. In fact, I think that is perhaps the most important, you might say, fabric that holds the society together.

I look at what I have not and think myself unhappy; others look at what I have and think me happy.

Certain names always awake certain prejudices.

In collecting evidence upon any medical subject, there are but three sources from which we can hope to obtain it; viz. from observation on medical the living subject; from examination of the dead; and from experiments upon living animals.

A smart mother makes often a better diagnosis than a poor doctor.

We're not able to do anything about the bomb, but we can do something about the results. We're able to heal the people - not all of them. Some people died. But we're able to heal people, so we're doing something positive. And that's a great motivator.

Having made a sufficient opening to admit my finger into the abdomen, I passed it between the intestines to the spine, and felt the aorta greatly enlarged, and beating with excessive force. By means of my finger nail, I scratched through the peritoneum on the left side of the aorta, and then gradually passed my finger between the aorta and the spine, and again penetrated the peritoneum, on the right side of the aorta. I had now my finger under the artery, and by its side I conveyed the blunt aneurismal needle, armed with a single ligature behind it.

My lectures were highly esteemed, but my operations less thought of, so that I am of opinion that my operations rather kept down my practice, than increased it.

Of the many 'firsts' with which I have been involved at the Texas Heart Institute —including the first successful human heart transplant in the United States and the first total artificial heart transplant in the world—the achievement that may have the greatest impact on health care did not occur in the operating room or in the research laboratory. It happened on a piece of paper... when we created the first-ever packaged pricing plan for cardiovascular surgical procedures.

Humility leads to the highest distinction, because it leads to self-improvement.

I have made many mistakes myself; in learning the anatomy of the eye I dare say, I have spoiled a hatfull; the best surgeon, like the best general, is he who makes the fewest mistakes.

The Wright brothers' first flight was shorter than a Boeing 747's wing span. We've just begun with heart transplants.

Real success requires respect for and faithfulness to the highest human values-honesty, integrity, self-discipline, dignity, compassion, humility, courage, personal responsibility, courtesy, and human service.

The historian must be a poet; not to find, but to find again; not to breathe life into beings, into imaginary deeds, but in order to re-animate and revive that which has been; to represent what time and space have placed at a distance from us.

I still take failure very seriously, but I've found that the only way I could overcome the feeling is to keep on working, and trying to benefit from failures or disappointments. There are always some lessons to be learned. So I keep on working.

Every discoverer of a new truth, or inventor of the method which evolves it, makes a dozen, perhaps fifty, useless combinations, experiments, or trials for one successful one. In the realm of electricity or of mechanics there is no objection to this. But when such rejected failures involve a torture of animals, sometimes fearful in its character, there is a distinct objection to it.

Lofty mountains are full of springs; great hearts are full of tears.

Mothers are generally starvers or feeders

You see it in schools all over... the concept that 'I'll be somewhat less than my best in order to make those around me feel more comfortable' is alive and well... I'm very keen that they understand that if they make themselves a little less than they can be, it is a one-way street to mediocrity.

Dying is nothing, but pain is a very serious matter.