| Features | Spring 2009 |
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Doctor Who? In a rant on the folly of pharmaceuticals, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., Class of 1836, once declared, “I firmly believe that if the whole materia medica could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be all the better for mankind—and all the worse for the fishes.” Holmes was not the only Harvard doctor to be a quotable notable. Can you match the statements below with their sources? (Keep in mind that several of these Harvard Medical School graduates and faculty members are quoted more than once.) Quotations 1. “If you don’t fall down, you aren’t trying hard enough, you aren’t trying to do things that are hard enough for you. So, falling down is part of learning for whatever you do….” 2. The great secret, known to internists and learned early by internists’ wives, but still hidden from the general public, is that most things get better by themselves. Most things, in fact, are better by morning. 3. An expert is a man who tells you a simple thing in a confused way in such a fashion as to make you think the confusion is your own fault. 4. When you have to make a choice and don’t make it, that is in itself a choice. 5. 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. 6. A segregated hospital makes the white person feel superior and the black person feel inferior. It sets the black person apart from all other citizens as being a different kind of citizen and a different kind of medical student and physician, which you know and we know is not the case. What the Negro physician needs is equal opportunity for training and practice—no more, no less. 7. Drugs are here to stay. History teaches that it is vain to hope that drugs will ever disappear and that all efforts to eliminate them from society are doomed to failure. 8. Every now and then a man’s mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions. 9. We all live every day in virtual environments, defined by our ideas. 10. I can play hardball as well as anybody. That’s what I did, cut people’s hearts out. 11. Sometimes you can tell a large story with a tiny subject. 12. One hears of the mechanical equivalent of heat. What we now need to discover in the social realm is the moral equivalent of war: something heroic that will speak to men as universally as war does, and yet will be as compatible with their spiritual selves as war has proved itself to be incompatible. 13. Man can’t help hoping even if he is a scientist. He can only hope more accurately. 14. In the Middle Ages, people took potions for their ailments. In the nineteenth century they took snake oil. Citizens of today’s shiny, technological age are too modern for that. They take antioxidants and extract of cactus instead. 15. Leaders often find themselves temporarily alone. 16. The state should, I think, be called “Anaesthesia.” This signifies insensibility…. 17. Tobacco is a filthy weed, 18. Aloft, floating free beneath the moist, gleaming membrane of bright blue sky, is the rising earth, the only exuberant thing in this part of the cosmos. 19. First, you know, a new theory is attacked as absurd; then it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant; finally it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it. 20. Yes, I am the first woman on the Harvard faculty—but not the first one who should have been appointed! 21. A vigorous five-mile walk will do more good for an unhappy but otherwise healthy adult than all the medicine and psychology in the world. 22. Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrassment. They farm fungi, raise aphids as livestock, launch armies into war, use chemical sprays to alarm and confuse enemies, capture slaves, engage in child labor, exchange information ceaselessly. They do everything but watch television. Alumni and faculty a. Tenley Albright ’61, surgeon and U.S. Olympic gold medalist in figure skating, 1956 b. William B. Castle ’21, HMS professor of medicine, 1924–1968, and a founder of experimental hematology c. Michael Crichton ’69, writer for film and television; film director and producer; author of nonfiction works; and novelist whose works, such as The Andromeda Strain and Jurassic Park, were often made into movies d. Harvey Cushing, Class of 1895, HMS professor of surgery, 1912–1932; father of neurosurgery; and medical historian e. William Frist ’78, cardiologist and U.S. Senate Majority Leader, 2003–2007 f. Ernest Gruening, Class of 1912, journalist; U.S. senator, 1959–1969; territorial governor of Alaska, 1939–1953 g. Alice Hamilton, HMS assistant professor of industrial medicine, 1919–1935, and founder of U.S. industrial toxicology h. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., Class of 1836, HMS professor of anatomy and physiology, 1847–1882; HMS dean, 1847–1853; writer and poet i. William James, Class of 1869, psychologist and philosopher j. Charles Krauthammer ’75, Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist who writes about policy and politics k. Karl A. Menninger, Class of 1917, psychiatrist, philanthropist, and author l. Eliot Porter ’29, celebrated nature photographer m. Lewis Thomas ’37, dean of New York University School of Medicine, 1954–1969; dean of the Yale School of Medicine, 1969–1972; president of Memorial Sloan–Kettering Institute, 1973–1983; poet and essayist well known for his many books, including The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher n. Benjamin Waterhouse, one of the first faculty members appointed to HMS, 1782; first Hersey Professor of Theory and Practice of Physic at HMS, 1783–1812; scientist; and writer o. Andrew Weil ’68, author; entrepreneur; and practitioner, teacher, and advocate of integrative medicine p. Paul Dudley White, Class of 1911, pioneering cardiologist q. Louis Tompkins Wright, Class of 1915, surgeon and the first black chair of the Board of Directors of NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 1934–1953 Answer Key 1. a; 2. m; 3. b; 4. i; 5. d; 6. q; 7. o; 8. h; 9. c; 10. e; 11. l; 12. i; 13. k; 14. j; 15. f; 16. h; 17. n; 18. m; 19. i; 20. g; 21. p; 22. m Fred R. Shapiro is editor of The Yale Book of Quotations (Yale University Press, 2006). Photo of Oliver wendell Holmes, Sr.: Boston Medical Library in the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine |
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