As the Readers’s Digest once said: ‘Many persons call a doctor when all they want is an audience.

But she was one of those doctors who hadn’t gotten the memo from the American health-care system that says that you should only listen to a patient for three minutes, tops, before writing him a referral and/or a prescription and firing him out the door just as the next patient was being fired in.

I have noticed that doctors who fail in the practice of medicine have a tendency to seek one another's company and aid in consultation.

I find people only listen to you when they ask you to talk to them.

The doctor is effective only when he himself is affected.

There is only one excuse for a speaker's asking the attention of his audience: he must have either truth or entertainment for them.

A booby is he, to be sure, </br> Who, being ill and seeking cure, </br> A sickly doctor calls.

People,” the doctor said sadly, “are always so anxious to get things out into the open where they can put a name to them, even a meaningless name, so long as it has something of a scientific ring.

Next time you meet a doctor, and you sit down in his office and he starts to talk, if you have the sense that he isn’t listening to you, that he’s talking down to you, and that he isn’t treating you with respect, listen to that feeling. You have thin-sliced him and found him wanting.

People who insist on being addressed as “doctor” because they have Ph.D.’s, as if these degrees represent an important achievement, rather than a reluctance to leave college;

If in the guise of philosophers, they [declaim speeches] with a view to their own profit and reputation, and not to improve you, that indeed is shocking. For it is as if a physician when visiting patients should disregard their treatment and their restoration to health, and should bring them flowers and courtesans and perfume.

Doctors are men who prescribe medicine of which they know little, to human beings of whom they know less, to cure diseases of which they know nothing.

The only way to entertain some folks is to listen to them.

[About doctors] And they say, they always say the same thing. They say "Your appointment is at four," and it's never at four! You go down there at four and you have to wait in that waiting room with all the coughers for another bloody hour. You know when that doctor comes out at five, and he'll say, "I'll see you now." "No, you fuckin' won't! I've got a few more posters to read yet! Sit the fuck down!"