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

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.”

It is not a case we are treating; it is a living, palpitating, alas, too often suffering fellow creature.

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.

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.

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

Let me recommend the best medicine in the world: a long journey, at a mild season, through a pleasant country, in easy stages.

In the name of Hippocrates doctors have invented the most exquisite form of torture ever known to man: survival.

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

Health indeed is a precious thing, to recover and preserve which we undergo any misery, drink bitter potions, freely give our goods—restore a man to his health, his purse lies open to thee.

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