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. A doctor who cannot take out your appendix properly will recommend you to a doctor who will be unable to remove your tonsils with success.

Our object to-day is to point out to you, brethren, that tendency we all have to consult another, in order to shun consulting ourselves.

But when ill indeed,
E'en dismissing the doctor don't always succeed.

Doctors can be sincere and sincerely wrong.

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

Felix Plater notes of some young physicians, that study to cure diseases, catch them themselves, will be sick, and appropriate all symptoms they find related of others to their own persons.

The truth is, medical doctors are more likely to commit suicide than any other professional group. But facing this fact remains largely taboo. Fear of stigma is one reason broken healers often hide or self-treat their pain (with substances legal and not). Fear of repercussion from hospitals and licensing boards is another.
Why certain physicians kill themselves is harder to parse. Are they melancholy from the get-go — or does work push them over the edge? Although research suggests that many doctors are emotionally muted, experts also believe they start life with no greater risk of depression than anyone else. Yet once a day, on average, an American physician takes his or her life.

It is unsettling to find how little it takes to defeat success in medicine. You come as a professional equipped with expertise and technology. You do not imagine that a mere matter of etiquette could foil you. But the social dimension turns out to be as essential as the scientific — matters of how casual you should be, how formal, how reticent, how forthright. Also: how apologetic, how self-confident, how money-minded. In this work against sickness, we begin not with genetic or cellular interactions, but with human ones. They are what make medicine so complex and fascinating. How each interaction is negotiated can determine whether a doctor is trusted, whether a patient is heard, whether the right diagnosis is made, the right treatment given. But in this realm there are no perfect formulas.

No matter what measures are taken, doctors will sometimes falter, and it isn’t reasonable to ask that we achieve perfection. What is reasonable is to ask that we never cease to aim for it.

Many persons call a doctor when all they want is an audience.

No matter what measures are taken, doctors will sometimes falter, and it isn't reasonable to ask that we achieve perfection. What is reasonable is to ask that we never cease to aim for it.

When we want to do something while unconsciously certain to fail, we seek advice so we can blame someone else for the failure.

When a doctor does go wrong he is the first of criminals.

I would give great praise to the physician whose mistakes are small, for perfect accuracy is seldom to be seen, since many physicians seem to me to be in the same plight as bad pilots, who, if they commit mistakes while conducting the ship in a calm do not expose themselves, but when a storm and violent hurricane overtake them, they then, from their ignorance and mistakes, are discovered to be what they are, by all men, namely, in losing their ship.