Friday, February 21, 2014

Quote of the Day (William James, on Med School ‘Humbug’)



"I embraced the medical profession a couple of months ago. My first impressions are that there is much humbug therein, and that, with the exception of surgery, in which something positive is sometimes accomplished, a doctor does more by the moral effect of his presence on the patient and family, than by anything else. He also extracts money from them."—William James, future American pioneer of psychology (and brother of novelist Henry James), offering his first dour impressions of medical school, in a letter of February 21, 1864, quoted in Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought And Character Of William James, Vol. I (1935)

Some things just don’t change, even a century and a half later…

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