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 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.

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.

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.”

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.

Let me recommend the best medicine in the world: a long journey, at a mild season, through a pleasant country, in easy stages.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

No families take so little medicine as those of doctors, except those of apothecaries.