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

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.”

Be temperate in wine, in eating, girls, and sloth, or the Gout will seize you.

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.

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

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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

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