Because the newer methods of treatment are good, it does not follow that the old ones were bad: for if our honorable and worshipful ancestors had not recovered from their ailments, you and I would not be here today.

Well now, there’s a remedy for everything except death.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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