The only places where American medicine can fully live up to its possibilities are the teaching hospitals.

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

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

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

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

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.

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

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

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

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

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.

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.

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.