You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

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

Be temperate in wine, in eating, girls, and sloth, or the Gout will seize you.

The poets did well to conjoin music and medicine, because the office of medicine is but to tune the curious harp of man’s body.

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.

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

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

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

Keep away from physicians. It is all probing and guessing and pretending with them. They leave it to nature to cure in her own time, but they take the credit. As well as very fat fees.

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.

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.

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.

Well now, there’s a remedy for everything except death.