He is the best physician who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope.

Doctors don’t know everything really. They understand matter, not spirit. And you and I live in spirit.

How many desolate creatures on the earth have learnt the simple dues of fellowship and social comfort in a hospital.

The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

The doctor occupies a seat in the front row of the stalls of the human drama, and is constantly watching and even intervening in the tragedies, comedies, and tragicomedies which form the raw material of the literary art.

The only places where American medicine can fully live up to its possibilities are the teaching hospitals.

To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.

We have to ask ourselves whether medicine is to remain a humanitarian and respected profession or a new but depersonalized science in the service of prolonging life rather than diminishing human suffering.

Physician, heal yourself: thus you help your patient too. Let his best help be to see with his own eyes the man who makes himself well.

Because the newer methods of treatment are good, it does not follow that the old ones were bad: for if our honorable and worshipful ancestors had not recovered from their ailments, you and I would not be here today.

Let the young know they will never find a more interesting, more instructive book than the patient himself.

When the physician said to him, “You have lived to be an old man,” he said, “That is because I never employed you as my physician.”