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

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

I am dying with the help of too many physicians.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives.

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.

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