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.

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

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

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

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

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.

Doctors don’t know everything really. They understand matter, not spirit. And you and I live in spirit.

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

It is not a case we are treating; it is a living, palpitating, alas, too often suffering fellow creature.

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.”

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.

Keep away from physicians. It is all probing and guessing and pretending with them. They leave it to nature to cure in her own time, but they take the credit. As well as very fat fees.