Voltaire Quotation

Factual Questions
1

Can anyone give be a cite for the quote that I believe to be by Voltaire:

"Medicine is the art of entertaining the patient, as the body heals itself.”

Thanks

2

In french “L’art de la medecine consiste a distraire le patient pedant que la nature le guérit” . So that would be nature which heals the patient. Doesn’t make much of a difference.

Anyway, though I found many occurences of the quotation on google, none was giving the title of the book which would have included it (contrarily to many others Voltaire’s quotations I found in the process).

3

Thanks for the translation.

I couldn’t find a cite on google either. Perhaps a Francophone polymath will drop by at some time!

4

I can’t find the answer as yet, but the original is probably

I found this quote referred to in the 1820’s in the US, and it was attributed as “says a foreign writer.”

5

…and the answer may be Moliere.

In his L’Amour Medicin, 1665, he evidently describes physicians as men who “chatter nonsense in the bedchambers of the sick either till nature has cured or physic killed the patient.”

The above is NOT a direct quote, but rather a description which I stole from an 1811 article on the history of the French stage.

A knowledgeable fool is a greater fool than an ignorant fool. Moliere.

*Of all human follies there’s none could be greater than trying to render our fellow-men better. * Moliere.

Fighting ignorance since 1973–it’s taking longer than we thought. Cecil Adams

6

In Voltaire’s day this was more true than not. In fact, In a TV interview I heard the head of Sloan-Kettering hospital medical staff say that before the advent of antibiotics this was pretty close, if not 100% true. He named the development of sulfanilamide as the turning point.