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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

All pain is one malady with many names.

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.”