Medicine and disease - Quotes from Science Fiction

A lot of quotations carefully collected from a very big amount of books and divided by categories.

Have fun reading it, this is really interesting and breathtaking!

In this country if a man falls into ill health, or catches any disorder, or fails bodily in any way before he is seventy years old, he is tried before a jury of his countrymen, and if convicted is held up to public scorn and sentenced more or less severely as the case may be.

- Samuel Butler, Erewhon, or, Over the Range (1872)

A true physician begins his cure with a healthy man.

- Yevgeny Zamiatin, We (1924), translated by Mirra Ginsburg (1972)

Nurses run a hospital as if it were a nursery for backward children.

- Robert A. Heinlein, The Puppet Masters (1951)

Earth had become Hospital Earth, physician to a Galaxy, surgeon to a thousand worlds, midwife to those susceptible to midwifery and psychiatrist to those whose inner lives zigged when their outer lives zagged.

- Alan E. Nourse, ''Contamination Crew'' (1958)

Jails and hospitals have one thing in common: they can be very hard to get out of.

- Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land (1961)

I myself went into a hospital and came out French.

- Cordwainer Smith, ''Alpha Ralpha Boulevard'' (1961)

What can an old man do in a cold room without drugs in a winter that does not seem to end? Die, that was all, so he had died.

- Harry Harrison, ''Roommates'' (1971)

Everyone is sick on Pergamon, it's the law.

- Josephine Saxton, ''Elouise and the Doctors of the Planet Pergamon'' (1972)

My brief stay at the hospital had already convinced me that the medical profession was an open door to anyone nursing a grudge against the human race.

- J. G. Ballard, Crash (1973)

Most young Anarresti felt that it was shameful to be ill. [. . .] They felt illness to be a crime, if an involuntary one. To yield to the criminal impulse, to pander to it by taking pain relievers, was immoral.

- Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974)

The government must look after him and restore him to health, because health is the inalienable right of the citizens of a democracy.

- Ursula K. Le Guin, ''The New Atlantis'' (1975)

I've tolerated doctors as individuals; as a class they terrify me.

- Edward Bryant, ''Particle Theory'' (1977)

All medical men are voyeurs.Why else would they become doctors?

- Joan D. Vinge, The Snow Queen (1980)

Sickness and healing are in every heart. Death and deliverance are in every hand.

- Orson Scott Card, Speaker for the Dead (1986)

In order to cure you must first understand.

- Alex Garland, 28 Days Later (film, 2002)