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.”

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.

You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Well now, there’s a remedy for everything except death.

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.

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

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.”