If popular medicine gave the people wisdom as well as knowledge, it would be the best protection for scientific and well-trained physicians.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of wisdom combined with knowledge in the field of medicine.
Rudolf Virchow suggests that if medical practitioners were able to impart not only knowledge but also wisdom to the public, it would enhance the overall health and well-being of society. This highlights the idea that scientific knowledge should be coupled with practical wisdom to better serve patients and promote a healthier community, thus supporting the role of qualified physicians.
In practice
In a health seminar to emphasize the importance of understanding health as more than just facts.
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. The physicians are the natural attorneys of the poor, and social problems fall to a large extent within their jurisdiction.
Medical education does not exist to provide students with a way of making a living, but to ensure the health of the community.
The physicians are the natural attorneys of the poor, and the social problems should largely be solved by them.
No doubt science cannot admit of compromises, and can only bring out the complete truth. Hence there must be controversy, and the strife may be, and sometimes must be, sharp. But must it even then be personal? Does it help science to attack the man as well as the statement? On the contrary, has not science the noble privilege of carrying on its controversies without personal quarrels?
Disease is not something personal and special, but only a manifestation of life under modified conditions, operating according to the same laws as apply to the living body at all times, from the first moment until death.
Belief has no place as far as science reaches, and may be first permitted to take root where science stops.
I learnt to distrust all physical concepts as the basis for a theory. Instead one should put one's trust in a mathematical scheme, even if the scheme does not appear at first sight to be connected with physics. One should concentrate on getting interesting mathematics.
If ever there was a slamming of the door in the face of constructive investigation, it is the word miracle. To a medieval peasant, a radio would have seemed like a miracle.
Imagination is the Discovering Faculty, pre-eminently. It is that which penetrates into the unseen worlds around us, the worlds of Science.
There does not exist a category of science to which one can give the name applied science. There are sciences and the applications of science, bound together as the fruit of the tree which bears it.
The strongest affection and utmost zeal should, I think, promote the studies concerned with the most beautiful objects, most deserving to be known.
But just as astronomy succeeded astrology, following Kepler's discovery of planetary regularities, the discoveries of these many principles in empirical explorations of intellectual processes in machines should lead to a science, eventually.
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