The truth is that medicine, professedly founded on observation, is as sensitive to outside influences, political, religious, philosophical, imaginative, as is the barometer to the changes of atmospheric density. Theoretically it ought to go on its own straightforward inductive path, without regard to changes of government or to fluctuations of public opinion. [But, there is] a closer relation between the Medical Sciences and the conditions of Society and the general thought of the time, than would at first be suspected.
Oliver Wendall Holmes
Currents and Counter-currents in Medical Science, 1860
How can a man spend his whole life in seeing suffering bravely borne and yet remain a hard or a vicious man? It is a noble, generous, kindly profession, and you youngsters have got to see that it remains so.
Arthur Conan Doyle
The Surgeon Talks, 1894