
“Cure the disease and kill the patient.”
Of Friendship
Essays (1625)
Variant: Cure the disease, and kill the patient.
Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book I, Chapter VI, Sec. 3
“Cure the disease and kill the patient.”
Of Friendship
Essays (1625)
Variant: Cure the disease, and kill the patient.
“We all labour against our own cure, for death is the cure of all diseases.”
Section 9
Religio Medici (1643), Part II
7:87
Variant translation: What cannot be cured by medicaments is cured by the knife, what the knife cannot cure is cured with the searing iron, and whatever this cannot cure must be considered incurable.
Aphorisms
“The art of medicine consists of amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.”
According to The Veterinarian (Monthly Journal of Veterinary Science) for 1851, edited by Mr. Percivall, this is Ben Jonson's "satirical definition of physic".
Misattributed
“Presidential ambition is a disease which can only be cured by embalming fluid.”
Quoting from Estes Kefauver
Misattributed
“For a desperate disease a desperate cure.”
Book II, Ch. 3. The Custom of the Isle of Cea
Essais (1595), Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
“Stop war? Impossible! There is no cure for the world's disease.”
Under Fire (1916), Ch. 1 - The Vision
“Government is a disease masquerading as its own cure.”
Financial Sense http://www.financialsense.com/fsu/editorials/steer/2007/0805.html Also quoted in “Covert Operation”, Jane Mayer, The New Yorker, (Aug. 30, 2010)