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.

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.

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.”

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

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

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 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.

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

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

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.

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

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

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