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

Health indeed is a precious thing, to recover and preserve which we undergo any misery, drink bitter potions, freely give our goods—restore a man to his health, his purse lies open to thee.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

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

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