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.

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.”

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

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

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

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.

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.

The poets did well to conjoin music and medicine, because the office of medicine is but to tune the curious harp of man’s body.

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.

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.

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