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.

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

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.”

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

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

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

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

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

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.

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

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