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.”

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.

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

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.

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

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

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

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.

The physician should look upon the patient as a besieged city and try to rescue him with every means that art and science place at his command.

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.”

Medication alone is not to be relied on. In one half the cases medicine is not needed, or is worse than useless. Obedience to spiritual and physical laws—hygiene of the body and hygiene of the spirit—is the surest warrant for health and happiness.

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.