Words matter. These are the best Barry Marshall Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
In high school I had B’s and C’s, not too many A’s, but I must have done well on that medical school test, and I must have had some charisma in the interview, so I ended up in medicine. Being a general practitioner was all I aspired to.
In medical school, it’s quite possible to get taught that you can diagnose everybody and treat everything. But then you get out in the real world and find that for most patients walking through your door, you have no idea what’s causing their symptoms.
The 20th-century ulcer epidemic was a sign of good health in American people – good diet, strong acidity and healthy immune response actually make ulcers more likely. That’s why businessmen eating giant T-bone steaks were prone to ulcers.
If you say you are the Safe Food Foundation, that means you’re implying that your food is safer or that every other bit of food that we’re eating is not safe. If they were a really honest foundation, they would call themselves the anti-GM foundation.
I was born in 1951 in Kalgoorlie, a prosperous mining town 370 miles east of Perth, Western Australia. Kalgoorlie was a gold rush town which sprang up in the desert after the Irishman Paddy Hannan struck gold there in 1892.
My mother was a nurse, and in her era, most diseases weren’t understood; people put mustard plasters on knees and rubbed camphor on your chest if you had a cough and did funny things to you if you had tuberculosis – all these things that really made very little difference once proper treatments were brought in.
I am told by others that I have a lateral-thinking, broad approach to problems, sometimes to my detriment. In school, my grades always suffered because I was continually mucking about with irrelevant side issues, which I often found to be more interesting.
My favourite book as a child was an old ‘Newne’s Children’s Encyclopaedia’ which my grandfather had bought just before World War II and donated to our family after seeing how interested we were in it. Each volume had special chapters called ‘Things Boys can Do.’ My brothers and I would pick out interesting projects.
Everything that’s supposedly caused by stress, I tell people there’s a Nobel Prize there if you find out the real cause.
It was so frustrating to see ulcer patients having surgery, or even dying, when I knew a simple antibiotic treatment could fix the problem.
If humans evolved in a tiny area of Africa, they only saw plants and animals within a 100-kilometre radius for a million years. When they began to migrate, there would have been different animals and plants – and potentially a lot of allergy issues.
Peptic ulcers became more common in the 20th century at the same time that these theories of Freud and other psychoanalysts became popular. And somehow those meshed, and this tradition emerged that ulcers were caused by stress or turmoil in one’s life.
There is no other prize in any country that carries the prestige that a Nobel bestows.
