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Long regarded as central to the contemporary understanding of medical ethics are four principles that must be satisfied in order to fulfill the requirements of moral decision-making. These principles are autonomy, justice, beneficence, and non-maleficence.

The growing professional disciplines of medical ethics and bioethics have had a profound impact on researchers, bedside doctors, associations of physicians, and government.

Medicine is not only a science; it is also an art. It does not consist of compounding pills and plasters; it deals with the very processes of life, which must be understood before they may be guided.

In the seventeenth century, the science of medicine had not wholly cut asunder from astrology and necromancy; and the trusting Christian still believed in some occult influences, chiefly planetary, which governed not only his crops but his health and life.

Ethical and questions of philosophy interest me a great deal.

In the history of medicine, it is not always the great scientist or the learned doctor who goes forward to discover new fields, new avenues, new ideas.

Philosophy was once considered science.

I have always looked upon alchemy in natural philosophy to be like enthusiasm in divinity, and to have troubled the world much to the same purpose.

There are three subjects on which the knowledge of the medical profession in general is woefully weak; they are manners, morals, and medicine.

Many have said of Alchemy, that it is for the making of gold and silver. For me such is not the aim, but to consider only what virtue and power may lie in medicines.