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.

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.

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

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

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

Doctors don’t know everything really. They understand matter, not spirit. And you and I live in spirit.

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.”

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

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

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

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

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.