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

Let the young know they will never find a more interesting, more instructive book than the patient himself.

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

All pain is one malady with many names.

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

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