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.”

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

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

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

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

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

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 poets did well to conjoin music and medicine, because the office of medicine is but to tune the curious harp of man’s body.

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

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.

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.