I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

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.”

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 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.

No families take so little medicine as those of doctors, except those of apothecaries.

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

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.

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

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

The physician should look upon the patient as a besieged city and try to rescue him with every means that art and science place at his command.

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

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.