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

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.

He is the best physician who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope.

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.

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.