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

Keep away from physicians. It is all probing and guessing and pretending with them. They leave it to nature to cure in her own time, but they take the credit. As well as very fat fees.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.”

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.

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.”

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