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.”

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.