Well now, there’s a remedy for everything except death.

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

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

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.”

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.”

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