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Home > Dictionary of Science Quotations > Scientist Names Index F > Sir John Forbes Quotes

Sir John Forbes
(Dec 1787 - 13 Nov 1861)

Scottish physician and medical writer who was personal physician to Queen Victoria. With Dr. Conolly, he established the quarterly British and Foreign Medical Review (Jan 1836 to 1847). Forbes performed nearly all of the editorial work. It became known as 'Forbes' Review' and read throughout Europe.

Science Quotes by Sir John Forbes (2 quotes)

Before his [Sir Astley Cooper’s] time, operations were too often frightful alternatives or hazardous compromises; and they were not seldom considered rather as the resource of despair than as a means of remedy; he always made them follow, as it were, in the natural course of treatment; he gave them a scientific character; and he moreover, succeeded, in a great degree, in divesting them of their terrors, by performing them unostentatiously, simply, confidently, and cheerfully, and thereby inspiring the patient with hope of relief, where previously resignation under misfortune had too often been all that could be expected from the sufferer.
— Sir John Forbes
In John Forbes (ed.), British and Foreign Medical Review (Jul 1840), 10, No. 19, 104. In Bransby Blake Cooper, The Life of Sir Astley Cooper (1843), Vol. 2, 37.
Science quotes on:  |  Biography (254)  |  Character (259)  |  Compromise (12)  |  Consider (428)  |  Sir Astley Paston Cooper (13)  |  Course (413)  |  Degree (277)  |  Despair (40)  |  Expect (203)  |  Follow (389)  |  Great (1610)  |  Hope (321)  |  Mean (810)  |  Means (587)  |  Misfortune (13)  |  Natural (810)  |  Operation (221)  |  Operations (107)  |  Patient (209)  |  Relief (30)  |  Remedy (63)  |  Scientific (955)  |  Seldom (68)  |  Succeed (114)  |  Sufferer (7)  |  Surgery (54)  |  Terror (32)  |  Time (1911)  |  Treatment (135)

In a large proportion of cases treated by physicians the disease is cured by nature, not by them. In a lesser, but not a small proportion, the disease is cured by nature in spite of them.
— Sir John Forbes
…...
Science quotes on:  |  Case (102)  |  Cure (124)  |  Disease (340)  |  Large (398)  |  Lesser (6)  |  Nature (2017)  |  Physician (284)  |  Proportion (140)  |  Small (489)  |  Spite (55)  |  Treat (38)


Carl Sagan Thumbnail In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion. (1987) -- Carl Sagan
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Quotations about:Atomic  BombBiologyChemistryDeforestationEngineeringAnatomyAstronomyBacteriaBiochemistryBotanyConservationDinosaurEnvironmentFractalGeneticsGeologyHistory of ScienceInventionJupiterKnowledgeLoveMathematicsMeasurementMedicineNatural ResourceOrganic ChemistryPhysicsPhysicianQuantum TheoryResearchScience and ArtTeacherTechnologyUniverseVolcanoVirusWind PowerWomen ScientistsX-RaysYouthZoology  ... (more topics)
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- 100 -
Sophie Germain
Gertrude Elion
Ernest Rutherford
James Chadwick
Marcel Proust
William Harvey
Johann Goethe
John Keynes
Carl Gauss
Paul Feyerabend
- 90 -
Antoine Lavoisier
Lise Meitner
Charles Babbage
Ibn Khaldun
Euclid
Ralph Emerson
Robert Bunsen
Frederick Banting
Andre Ampere
Winston Churchill
- 80 -
John Locke
Bronislaw Malinowski
Bible
Thomas Huxley
Alessandro Volta
Erwin Schrodinger
Wilhelm Roentgen
Louis Pasteur
Bertrand Russell
Jean Lamarck
- 70 -
Samuel Morse
John Wheeler
Nicolaus Copernicus
Robert Fulton
Pierre Laplace
Humphry Davy
Thomas Edison
Lord Kelvin
Theodore Roosevelt
Carolus Linnaeus
- 60 -
Francis Galton
Linus Pauling
Immanuel Kant
Martin Fischer
Robert Boyle
Karl Popper
Paul Dirac
Avicenna
James Watson
William Shakespeare
- 50 -
Stephen Hawking
Niels Bohr
Nikola Tesla
Rachel Carson
Max Planck
Henry Adams
Richard Dawkins
Werner Heisenberg
Alfred Wegener
John Dalton
- 40 -
Pierre Fermat
Edward Wilson
Johannes Kepler
Gustave Eiffel
Giordano Bruno
JJ Thomson
Thomas Kuhn
Leonardo DaVinci
Archimedes
David Hume
- 30 -
Andreas Vesalius
Rudolf Virchow
Richard Feynman
James Hutton
Alexander Fleming
Emile Durkheim
Benjamin Franklin
Robert Oppenheimer
Robert Hooke
Charles Kettering
- 20 -
Carl Sagan
James Maxwell
Marie Curie
Rene Descartes
Francis Crick
Hippocrates
Michael Faraday
Srinivasa Ramanujan
Francis Bacon
Galileo Galilei
- 10 -
Aristotle
John Watson
Rosalind Franklin
Michio Kaku
Isaac Asimov
Charles Darwin
Sigmund Freud
Albert Einstein
Florence Nightingale
Isaac Newton


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