No families take so little medicine as those of doctors, except those of apothecaries.

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

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.

There must be quite a few things a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many of them.

All pain is one malady with many names.

A miracle drug is any drug that will do what the label says it will do.

If a patient is poor, he is committed to a public hospital as “psychotic”; if he can afford the luxury of a private sanitarium, he is put there with the diagnosis of “neurasthenia”; if he is wealthy enough to be isolated in his own home under constant watch of nurses and physicians, he is simply an indisposed “eccentric.”

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.

I have yet, I believe, some years in store, for I have a good state of health and a happy mind, and I take care of both by nourishing the first with temperance and the latter with abundance. This, I believe, you will allow to be the true philosophy of life.

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

The best physician is he who can distinguish the possible from the impossible.

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.

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.