Medicine is the art and science of healing, or to make whole / holy. The word ‘medicine’ is derived from the Latin ars medicina. A physician (doctor) and nurse are practitioners of the prevention and treatment of illness for the purpose of wholeness. Veterinarians are physicians for animals.

The first week in May is National Nurses Month.

Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), the international medical humanitarian organization created by doctors and journalists in France in 1971, was awarded the 1999 Nobel Peace Prize.

Medical quotes
• “(It is infinitely better to transplant a heart) than to bury it so it can be devoured by worms.” ~ Christiaan Barnard
• “I have an almost complete disregard of precedent, and a faith in the possibility of something better. It irritates me to be told how things have always been done. I defy the tyranny of precedent. I go for anything new that might improve the past.” ~ Clara Barton
• “A physician who fails to enter the body of a patient with the lamp of knowledge and understanding can never treat diseases. He should first study all the factors, including environment, which influence a patient's disease, and then prescribe treatment. It is more important to prevent the occurrence of disease than to seek a cure.” ~ Acharya Charak
• “In the name of Hypocrites, doctors have invented the most exquisite form of torture ever known to man: survival.” ~ Edward Everett Hale
• “The unique function of the nurse is to assist the individual, sick or well, in the performance of those activities contributing to health or its recovery (or to peaceful death) that he would perform unaided if he had the necessary strength, will or knowledge.” Virginia Henderson
• “The man of understanding can no more sit quiet and resigned while his country lets literature decay than a good doctor could sit quiet and contented while some ignorant child was infecting itself with tuberculosis under the impression that it was merely eating jam tarts.” ~ Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading, 1934
• “There are more old drunkards than old physicians.” ~ Francois Rabelais
• “Medicine is a social science, and politics is nothing else but medicine on a large scale. Medicine, as a social science, as the science of human beings, has the obligation to point out problems and to attempt their theoretical solution: the politician, the practical anthropologist, must find the means for their actual solution.” ~ Rudolph Virchow