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.

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.

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

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

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

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.”

All pain is one malady with many names.

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

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

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

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

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.

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.